Sound & Sense: An Open Thread
The fifth of our recurring opportunities — currently, every other Thursday — to learn what your fellow subscribers are reading and writing and thinking about
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Not “till the autocrats among us can be / ‘literalists of / the imagination’ — above / insolence and triviality,” shall we see poetry, Marianne Moore wrote in 1919. When they “can present / for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” then “shall we have / it.”
I have an allergy to all grand definitions of poetry. The closest I’ve come myself is when I wrote, “Poetry is what all language wants to be when it grows up.” And even that attempt at comedy makes me sneeze. Still, the phrase Moore uses, “literalists of the imagination” (paraphrasing something Yeats said about Blake), sticks in the mind, as does the instantiation she gave it in the description of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
We may not be able to do better than this gestural kind of anti-definitional definition. We want our definitions to reflect genus and difference: A triangle is a plane figure (genus) formed with three bounding sides (difference from other species in the genus). And poetry doesn’t exactly resist this kind of definition. It’s just that it always squeezes under the fence, like a dog that won’t stay in the yard. The dog doesn’t mean to violate the rules, but the world beyond the fence is just too filled with things to smell, expanses to run, and people to meet.
Ah, well. What are you reading, writing, thinking about? Please let us and your fellow subscribers know in this open-mic thread.
Meanwhile, Sally Thomas and I are thinking about the fact that Poems Ancient and Modern now has 2,000 subscribers who have only the free subscription. Help us noodle through the mechanics, if you get a chance to add a comment to this thread.
The current paid-subscription price is $60 a year. Does that seem too high for a poem and commentary five days a week? What is the price point at which you think people would pay? Currently, all material is free. If we started locking some of that content for paid subscribers only, what percentage should be locked? What reward would make paying for this newsletter worth the cost?
I'm still reading Kristin Lavransdatter. Almost to the end. Oh it's even better the second time.
I just finished To Kill a Mockingbird, which I hadn't read since I was in school. Was it junior high or high school? I no longer remember.
I've been dipping into the Seamus Heaney collection 100 Poems, which is an anthology of favorites gathered by his wife and children. I really like the selections. Also I've been revisiting some favorite A.E. Stallings from her recent collection This Afterlife. She's delightful.
With the children I've been doing some read alouds of fairy tales, Andersen and Grimm, since we finished The Iliad and I realized we haven't done fairytales in years. It's fun to get the 16 year old talking about story structure and critiquing the plots of some of the Grimm stories. She's quite passionate.
16 year old and I are also reading Jane Eyre, which she was initially unsure about as we'd just finished a long run of Austen and it was quite a shift. Mr Rochester's bed has been set on fire and my daughter still has no idea about the identity of the woman in the attic. I'm enjoying watching the book through her eyes on this first read.
As far as subscribing, I know the workman is worth his wages, but there are SO MANY literary substacks I'd like to subscribe to and I've only got a limited budget for books, journals, and online subscriptions to draw from. It was already hard to choose just one or two literary journals to subscribe to. Especially since I seldom read them from cover to cover. For now I'm subscribing to a few for a while, but I might have to cancel subscriptions in order to rotate through the various substacks which have restricted content. I think my ideal price point is about $10-15 a year, which I know is too low for most content providers, but I also wonder if the volume of subscribers at a lower price point might make up the difference of charging more but getting fewer patrons?
As for writing, this week my husband and I took a serious look at our budget and decided that we were paying too much to keep our 20+ year old blogs online especially as writing has become more and more occasional. I am mourning the coming expiration of blog which he made for me when we were just dating.
And I've been wondering about whether I should start a substack of my own. Would a new venue inspire me to write more?
This week I found myself writing quite a bit about an Eavan Boland poem, Mother Ireland, in a series of comments on Facebook and had a brief notion that it could become an essay with a little tweaking; but I don't have time to do much polishing, and if I no longer have a blog where would I publish?
What is the price for inspiration, a breath of beauty before one's eyes, or a joy to remember.
Most subtracks seem to be $50/yr or $5/month. On the other hand, you do need to cover the expenses and keep food on the table. So, is it worth an extra $10/yr, for me yes, for another, only they can answer that.
To find out, maybe have a two week window, where it can be followed by subscribers for $50/yr. If you get enough new subscribers, that would be a signal to keep it there, if not, there is no need to lower it.
What are enough new subscribers, only you two can say.