Criticism Online

I'm an English PhD student and I'll admit that from a financial standpoint I've chosen the wrong career path. But I did not choose it for the promise of riches, but rather for the love of ideas and art.  I do it because I love it. But, the material realities of my life demand a certain level of financial stability (gotta pay those bills). Talk of career prospects in humanities  graduate departments tends to be highly pessimistic.  Our professors encourage us further in advanced degrees, yet warn of the hard road ahead.  Few tenured teaching positions at universities, few publishers interested in converting your dissertation on medieval literature into a book, few editorial positions at scholarly print journals.  We dread the coming day of graduation with anxious thoughts about the Death of the University, the Death of the Scholar.  "No one is reading anymore!," we lament and complain, blaming the problem on a disinterested public.

Reading "Howl"

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" :



This weekend I read The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, a collection of essays from poets, academics, and friends of Ginsberg's who recount their initial encouter with Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl."  A common thread throughout these accounts is the immense disruption that the poem caused to readers' understanding of themselves, of America, and of poetry. Edited by Jason Shinder, the volume includes essays from Frank Bidart, Sven Birkerts, Amiri Baraka, among others, which testify to the influence of "Howl" in shaping our contemporary sense of human experience.  "Howl"  speaks to a collective experience of both American dreams of "supernatural ecstasy" and capitalist nightmares of "sexless hydrogen" "Moloch."  But, "Howl" testifies to a collective experience that is on the fringe, the edges and extremes in the barely understood realms of human experience, of "Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!"  "dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!"  "Howl" validates that "sensitive bullshit" of our bodily, affective experience, resanctifying it as "Holy! Holy! Holy!" "Howl" speaks to those "who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity."  Yet, while Ginsberg speaks to those dwelling on the misunderstood edges of 'polite' and 'normal' middle-of-the-road American society, "Howl" also assembles a new community that understands humanity via its connectivity, one bridged in the recognition of experiences and ways of being that are conventionally partitioned off in those "buildings" of "judgment,"the "invincible madhouses" and "incomprehensible prison!"

In Process

The vision

Progress and Roadblocks

Would you call yourself a writer?

It's strange transitioning from a student into a writer.  To call myself a writer feels pompous, cocky and strange, yet I can now acknowledge that this is what I want to do. I love to think about ideas and I want to share that love with others. The problem is the doing. The actual act of putting hands to the keys.  I've recently filled yet another journal of hand written material, notes and reflections. This is all too familiar ground for me. I have stacks of these journals resting in the back of closets under beach towels and sweaters. But little good they do me until I type the words out and hit submit. Submit to who?  This is the second trickiest part of this transition.  How do you actually get published?  I've been looking around at different online magazines and academic journals, and seeing the detailed submission requirements continuously makes me cower away. Yet the daydream remains, and over these years has been building momentum, the dreams are becoming insistent, compelling me forth to write. And here I am, expressing it here to get in the practice, establish a routine, to push myself past the uncomfortable fear of the unknown.

Anyone else going through this process? Advice for navigating this terrain?