Make love and logic mix

All right. Here we go, kids, blogging adventure into the unknown, or little-known, or rather-overly-known. Who knows? Point is, I'm too old by half to be pulling the Sylvia Plath gig, but too wee to attempt pretentions to something else. So I take my blog title and pseudonym from the poem below, which has merit here, if not elsewhere, for a number of reasons. Okay, two reasons.

1. Plath wrote it at quite a young age, before she received any formal training in writing, and before she officially embarked on a career as a poet. I am young, and similarly have not a leg to stand on. This may be meaningless.
2. The basic paradox of the poem mirrors the basic paradox of this blog. Plath, a neophyte, youngling, apprentice in the world of Poetry, gives instructions, as though she were otherwise, to neophytes, younglings, apprentices. The result is stilted verse, which nevertheless conveys a goodly nugget or two of valuable reflection on how good verse is made. Similarly I, who have no basis to claim any sort of knowledge or experience (really) in the world of the Academy, will be claiming things all over the place in this blog. The result will no doubt be similarly stilted, but I hope nevertheless to convey something, well, at least worth reading.

Because, you see, I've been reading around in the Academic Blogosphere. And it tempted me. I'm not an academic (yet): I, like boringly numerous others before me, hold a B.A. from a Prestigious Small Liberal Arts College (a.k.a. "The Petri Dish"), and like slightly-fewer-yet-also-numerous others before me, harbor academic ambitions. Despite my total lack of qualifications, I maintain the belief that I have something to bring to the table. This is probably a result of the culture of petting and fond encouragement that reigned throughout my training in the Petri Dish.

I plan to be working, in sundry ways, in the Academic World for the next year, while I painstakingly prepare for tests, take tests, pound out statements of purpose, achingly trim and primp writing samples, bite my nails, and cower in fear of the thunderous hammer of rejection. I'm bound to have something to say about all of it. And about a whole bunch of other stuff along the way. All - or, really, some - will be revealed.


Notes to a Neophyte

Take the general mumble,
blunt as the faceless gut
of an anonymous clam,
vernacular as the strut
of a slug or small preamble
by snail under hump of home:

metamorphose the mollusk
of vague vocabulary
with structural discipline:
stiffen the ordinary
malleable mask
to the granite grin of bone.

For such a tempering task,
heat furnace of paradox
in an artifice of ice;
make love and logic mix,
and remember, if tedious risk
seems to jeopardize this:

it was a solar turbine
gave molten earth a frame,
and it took diamond stone
a weight of world and time
being crystallized from carbon
to the hardest substance known.

-- Sylvia Plath, c. 1948