Back into the underworld.

I did start writing again, and finalized my intro and one chapter. Pieces coming together.

Then I got into my Spicer chapter. I knew it was going to need vigorous revision because I took sizable pieces out and used them with some other things in the intro, to set up the whole project instead of that one chapter. I did not, however, know before rereading it more carefully this week that half of the first 30 pages doesn't really apply to the poetry it's about and the rest is fairly well not organized at all. The ideas are great, and I know that, and I still found myself bored by my own chapter -- the presentation is that desultory, the sections that hazily shaped, the readings that buried under nearly directionless bullshit. On the good side, Spicer criticism is virtually nonexistent, so it's not like I have to slog through pages of other people's terrible writing before I can fix my own, but I do have a job with this chapter. I'm having trouble even envisioning what the chapter is going to end up doing! I have to start out by somehow recapping the intro's theory of mythopoetic inspiration (to be precise, its theory of what the poet's position is within that experience) without just reiterating it. I need then to develop the parts of this theory that are uniquely expressed in Spicer's work, and then. . . well, there are a lot of things I want to cover, and I'm just hoping if I ski out to the end of those pages, doing so will make the next pieces clearer.

I think I'm going to end up talking about the other two books within Homage more than I have, which is great. I also think I'm going to end up with a series of sections each of which treat an image trope that plays out the theme I argue is at the core of Spicer's poetics, a queer relationship of identity between poet and the source of poetry. I think a piece I wrote about cars that didn't fit very well on the first draft will do a lot more on the second one as part of an exploration of travel and distance, which will resonate with Spicer's life, differently with the queer poetics I say he develops, and, as a great lagniappe, with themes from my Crane chapter. It's very, very unclear to me quite how all this will fall into place at the moment, though.

This chapter is much less together than my Eliot one is, in fact. Would have been nice if my advisor had pointed any of this out more than a year ago when I showed it to him and he blandly, blithely said that perhaps the theory went on a bit long, but it was good.

When I have a PhD, I wonder if I'll have to sneer at myself for having gotten one.