Per Una Selva Oscura

Started a new blog. http://perunaselvaoscura.tumblr.com A Project blog. Somewhat similar to my old http://diaryofa36thyear.blogspot.com. But a little more complex. In this age of tumblr and reblogging I can kind of get the scrapbook feel that the paper version of Diary of a 36th Year had.

The Diary blog was written literally by taking piece/fragments of my written diary and collaging them together. I have mostly forgone the written diary except for notes while reading. So that is not the project. The project is a sort of attempt to pull out some sort of prose narrative. I talk about poetry I'm reading, poetry readings in a obscure he/she way, a vague "he" coming out of having a real "he" in my life! And since I crashed one of the Public School meetings on the bible, I am interested in continuing and using the very interesting biblical aspects/ as well as readings from a book on the history of yoga I recently started reading. To combine religion/spirituality with poetry concerns, with personal life, and finally dreams, which I finally started to be able to remember again after having a month with nowhere to be (first time in 10 years I've had that much time off at once!). And I will probably be mixing in some Linguistics/TESOL aspects from my classes.

I got the idea while reading Book 2 of Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, Nights and Days, which is what I originally wanted to call it, but it was taken. Duncan talks a good deal about Dante, (not to mention a good deal about everything), so it seemed to fit. The Nights and Days section is a poetic meandering around the theme so far of night, with lots of exposition on stars, but it is really more the form and style of writing in this section, more than the content, that really inspired me. The idea of leaving jokey funny facebook posts behind, and writing in a poetic voice entirely — seems very appealing to me right now. Maybe too many people are witty these days, it is no longer appealing to me to be so. Combined with my new age in my new decade and my desire to be a teacher, which has somehow led to another level of interest in my writing. And I'm also started to view the prevalence of "witty" in some ways as connected to capitalism, when you are doing that you are selling something people want. I want to sell something I want.

But Inspiration #2 came about rather simultaneously as reading Book 2 of The H.D. Book, which came about through reading about how Kate Zambreno was writing a blog about wives of writers who wanted to be writers but never became writers, and how that blog ultimately became her book Heroines, and that inspired me to make a blog that could be a book, and could be a prose book. Trying to trick myself into prose through a device (but its so still poetry, but thats ok).

It is also organized by day. Day 1, Day 2 etc. But these are not real days since I'm about to become very busy with the semester. I'm thinking of them as biblical days. A logical end of course would be 365 days, but that seems a bit too much for a book, plus with the rebloggings, it would just be huge.

Thinking to research Dante a little bit more and those cute little circles of hell. Research the organization, etc. and see if I can do something with that...

Perhaps, yes.   Wikipedia says that the Comedy is made up of 14,233 lines that are divided into three canticas (Ital. pl. cantiche)—Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise)—each consisting of 33 cantos (Ital. pl. canti).  Perhaps I will stop on the 99th day.