The purpose of this blog, if I can continue with it, and for some reason I feel that it must have a purpose and that I must continue with it, will be to learn how to write critically in my own way. That is without having to resort to phrases like 'the plain musical tautness of Lorine Niedecker'. Without having to resort to 'phrases' at all for that matter. I mean maybe LN's poems do have said quality, but it doesn't feel like something that comes from my experience of the work. Its very hard to get to that. No big surprise, but one person who I feel is able to do that is Alice Notley in Coming After. And there's a temptation to try for Lester Bangs prosody. He did pretty much write about everything. But its seems ill-advised, after how many have imitated him, to go down that road. The other big rock critic I read in my teens and early early twenties was Simon Reynolds. I remember being pretty bowled over by The Sex Revolts. I found myself really turned off by it after a recent rereading tho. Like Bly on poetry, too many binaries. Putting things in binaries is just too easy. This will be mostly a poetics blog. I won't consider it a poetry blog because dodo is that, and its that because it really is all poetry, or has been for some time. Thing about poetics blogs, lime tree, Silliman's Blog, bemsha swing et al., is that they all seem to have an implied basis (at least partly) in theory. Maybe theory's not the right word, but what I mean is an implied thing where you at least partly understand poetry through, I don't know, Roland Barthes. I have always thought (really) that the way one understands poetry is through itself. I mean you could look at Lunch Poems and contextualize it with the work of someone who dealt theoretically in a similar vein. I think people like Ron Silliman have done alot to bring that about. Do you have to tho? But like I said I just don't have that frame of reference. I'd love to read Barthes. I'd probably like it alot. But I always just figured you understand poetry by reading poetry. Like with Notley. If you want to understand her poetry, you read her poetry with an open mind. And then maybe you read some poets she mentions in interviews and such, who might have influenced her own work. Is this naive?