Returning (Again) to the Blog

Sometimes we falter, even with the best of intentions. When I last posted, almost two years ago, I fully intended to keep writing and posting to this blog on a regular basis. Alas, I fell far short, slipped into the old habits of neglect and distraction, and did not stay firm to the resolution to write and blog more often.

So I’m trying again.

There seems to be something of a zeitgeist happening  (see Donna Vorreyer’s post)– many of those of us who once actively blogged about poetry and literature in the 2000s are finding ourselves coming back to the blog form. Increasingly Twitter and Facebook feel too ephemeral, too dysfunctional, and too distracting. There, we find ourselves tempted to write for immediate response and popular validation – weirdly, for me at least, the blog form feels less of a public performance and more of a space of private reflection — a place where one can wrestle with ideas, sometimes to find answers, sometimes simply to start making sense of the many pieces we’ve gathered.

Most of what I’m interested in writing and blogging about hasn’t changed that much. I do have some projects and interests which will likely show up.  Aside from poetry and technology, I’ll be spending some time talking about writing prompt creation (and how I’ve started coming up with ways to create random prompt generators) as well as cut up poetry (I lost a lot of old literary journals and around 30 books to water damage and mold — which I only discovered recently when I emptied my old storage unit in Los Angeles and hauled everything back to my new apartment in Vancouver, WA — so I’ve started working on a set of art projects to find a use for the pages and parts that are still usable).  I’m still fond of British crime and detective tv shows, still interested in the occasional K-Drama and J-Drama, and still watching the occasional anime series. These too might find their way into blog posts.  As well as whatever thoughts I have about the computer game(s) I’m currently playing.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to start again and hope to engage and interact with a larger dialog about writing, art, and how we make sense of the world.

The Hermit’s Return

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I stopped blogging almost 7 years ago on June 21, 2009.  I don’t recall the reasons, perhaps it was just the time demands of graduate school or the mental and emotional exhaustion that tend to accompany those studies.  For whatever reason, I wrote a post about my late father on Father’s Day, marking the silence and his absence, then did not return.

It’s true, I’ve been busy.  Writing and defending the dissertation, completing the second book of poetry and finding it a home, searching for a teaching position in the post-Ph.D. world, and in general, trying to make sense of the world and its unexpected twists and turns.  I’m grateful for my successes and thankful to have the opportunity to try again when I’m not.   I think in some respects I stopped blogging simply because I didn’t have the energy to keep going.  I think at the time I was  also more enamored with Facebook and other more immediate forms of social interaction.  There were a lot of reasons.  Now things have come full circle. I’m ready to return to a quieter space where I have more room and time to unfold my thoughts.  So here I am, back in the poetry blog-o-sphere, doing my thing.

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be writing on a wide variety of topics.  I’m working on a post about the absent recluse figure in classical Chinese poetry (somewhat appropriate given my own long absence), as well as some more practical posts about starting new writing projects, navigating the uncharted terrain of launching a second book, and my efforts to create useful online literary resources.