A Poetic Interlude: On Walking along the Sidewalk by yours truly

Dedicated to my father (January 21, 1957-October 16, 2008)

On Walking along the Sidewalk

 

A red leaf crossed my path today

It fluttered as it fell, although the day was still and gray

A bird, falling like rain

Plunging into the abyss—

But it was a leaf.

 

A car halted in front of me

—Where is the hospital?—

Just continue straight ahead, you’ll get to it

I promise

You’ll find it, in the end.

 

All roads are crossroads

We pass between stillness and motion

Destination and journey

Catcalls, quiet smiles, shouts of hello

We meet travelers we may never see again

And then we cross the road

 

Look both ways

If Death can see you he will stop for you

—Or so we think—

Walking along the edge, the brink

Of the River of Time

The curb of life, short

And solid as it may seem

Is only a path to where the sidewalk ends

 

The first leaf of fall

The final leaf of summer

Burns in its phoenix blaze of unending glory

I will not die, but turn to ash on the forest floor

Upon the bones of my ancestors,

The wombs of my progeny

 

And I will spring forth in the morning

When the light is new

And the air is still

The River shall halt for me

And I will drink from its immortal tears

And live—

 

But there is no time to spare

The clock ticks on and I am already late. 

 

"Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain": Introducing the author

Hello! I am Mary, a sophomore in college who dreams of writing the great American novel before the Singularity claims the last spark of human creativity.

This blog is in an experimental stage; I'll run the gamut from posting creative work to think pieces to literary reviews and analyses. I am not entirely sure what I intend to do with this just yet, so bear with me as I embark on the creative process of self-discovery! Hopefully I'll not drown in its tumultuous waters.

Let me briefly explain this blog's title. An idea that has been rambling around in my mind lately has been the concept of the "anxiety of influence" which Harold Bloom claimed affected writers, especially the male poets of the Romantic period, by engaging them in an essentially destructive process of trying to one-up their literary predecessors. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar extended this into an "anxiety of authorship" in "The Madwoman in the Attic" which plagues female writers who essentially have no predecessors in the patriarchal pantheon of literature. Emily Dickinson touched upon this in her poem "A Word dropped careless on a Page," writing, "Infection in the sentence breeds / We may inhale Despair". As a female writer, I certainly feel this anxiety, but I wanted to claim this problem which seems unique to women as a positive. We should turn the infection in the sentence into a virus, letting it spread from writer to writer to cure literature of its biases. Let minority voices be heard, and let's create a new living pantheon of black, female, LGBTQ, Latino, Asian writers to replace the ubiquitous old, white, dead guys.

That's all for now. Please keep reading! It'll be a fun ride.

P.S. The title of this post is from Keats. 10 points to Gryffindor to everyone who knew that!