Summertime Ramblings, v1

I hope you had a great Independence Day!  I did, though sadly I have no pictures to prove it.  In "typical me" fashion, I forgot my camera on the day when the weather was sunny, the food splendid, and the fireworks extra stupendous.  We always go to my aunt and uncle's house, for a cookout and fireworks; and in their neighborhood, there's a de facto fireworks show coming from all directions, from around nine o'clock and onwards.  Absolutely gorgeous!  Even in our own neighborhood, you can hear them 'til you fall asleep; and when I woke up, everything was unexpectedly silent.


Much nicer than last night.  I dreamed school had just started again, and I was three days behind in homework, with a paper due in second-year Spanish class.  Ugh.  Then I woke up to find that I had fallen asleep while reading.  Hawthorne might have something to do with it; his vivid descriptions of Italian parks and flowers in The Marble Faun are enough to make any sleepy person even more sleepy.  But that wouldn't account for dreaming about school.  And failing in a class I'm not even going to take.  Or perhaps the juxtaposition of two contrasting scenes makes them directly related somehow.  O_o 

Today I'm going to pull weeds, which is fine with me.  There aren't a whole lot.  And I've been terribly lazy this summer...oh, I do my chores and stuff.  But lately I've been feeling kind of useless.  I've read some books, I've done a little writing, and I've been working on sewing projects.  It just starts to seem trivial, that's all.  Except for writing.

Last month, I finally finished that gargantuan poem, the one I started in November of last year.  It's 200 lines, in AABA rhyming scheme.  Without giving it away, I can say that the topic is pretty deep, and it's probably one of the better things I've ever written, in either poetry or prose.  They say to write what you know--the chief problem with that is whether your audience gives a jot about what you do know.  But this topic ought to appeal to a fairly large audience.  And, no, it's not a romantic ballad.   >_>

I do think poetry is the most subjective of all art forms, even more than visual or musical.  You can show me something by Picasso, or make me listen to Schoenberg; I can't stand either of them, but I'll admit that, in all their grotesque and disturbing dissonance, there is something slightly interesting in them.  On the other hand, read me a free-verse poem by a contemporary poet; and it probably won't make the least impression on me, except that "I don't like it".  Most poetry--especially free verse--is too sparse, and too dependent upon the author's individual thought processes, to be universally understood in any extent.  So whenever I am inclined to despise my own poetry, this aspect makes me think again, and keeps me believing that somebody somewhere will like it, whether I do or not.  



 Jörg Hempel [CC-BY-SA-2.0-de], via Wikimedia Commons

Speaking of poetry, I had to look up celandines, which seem to have been Wordsworth's favorite flower. They remind me of buttercups; actually, they're related, according to Wikipedia.  As you can see in my profile pic, my favorite flower--or one of them--is probably forget-me-nots...I don't think any poem I could write would do them justice.  But back to celandines...Wordsworth wrote some great lines about them (emphasis added):

Eyes of some men travel far
For the finding of a star;
Up and down the heavens they go
Men that keep a mighty rout!
I'm as great as they, I trow,
Since the day I found thee out,
Little flower!--I'll make a stir
Like a great Astronomer.

And about daisies:

Proud be the Rose, with rains and dews
Her head impearling;
Thou liv'st with less ambitious aim,
Yet hast not gone without thy fame;

On that sunshiny note, I think I'll go do the weeding now...