I confess: the part of me that knows she's no Poet Laureate got spooked by the whole ides of March malediction.
But my inner Louche Language Lover couldn't resist crying "havoc!" and letting slip the doggerel…
Friends, poets, countrymen, lend me your links!
I come to blog for BestAmPo, and to praise them!
You all did love this site before, and with just cause.
These noble editors hath been most honorable
For they have brought many writers home to roam.
Now, you may fear their judgment hast gone brutish
And exclaim: They must have lost their reason!
Shouldn't this dame's ambition be made of sterner stuff?!
Bear with me. My heart is with you in cyberspace
And here I am to speak what I do know:
That New York City is alive with the poetics of place
And since these kind editors granted me this good fortune,
I'm in a merry mood, and I will give you everything I've got.
All sloppy scans aside, I hope you'll enjoy the ride:
A free-associative stroll through the mews of my mind.
*****
No doubt there is a pack of black-turtleneckers already lighting torches, all hot to flame me for this silliness, but for those of you still reading along, here's a preview of this week's forthcoming passions:
• My affection for NYC as a marvelously messy muse
• Creative inspiration, process and and presentation (the subjects that come up most often with my writing/creativity/life coach clients)
• Personal favorites by my literary heroes
…and a few by this Louche Language Lover that made it past the censor
******
Some Random Roman/Gotham Associations:
The copy of Julius Caesar I pulled off my shelf to skim for the above spoof time-traveled me back to when I was a uniform-wearing 7th grader on Manhattan's Upper East Side. I was shocked to see my own name written in a fussy miniature script I don't think I could recreate today and I haven't used since the last century. And the variety of fountain pen inks and the number of vocabulary words I underlined to look up (in a hard-copy dictionary!) are mortifying. I recall that this was the first Shakespearean play we ever had to read and finishing it felt like an enormous intellectual triumph. Thinking about it today, I suspect that the English department chose this political play about back-stabbing and its dire consequences to hold up a mirror to the Brutus-ness brewing in our terrible tween midst. ••• When I saw the Shakespeare in the Park production in August 2000, Jeffrey Wright gave a sort of gangsta swagger to his Antony and I remember thinking that it was a sign of those painfully PC times that no critics commented on his interpretation.