Two Horses Postscript

Thanks to Richard and Maria for their interesting comments to my preceding post. They’re both practitioners of blogging and the poetic arts; both damned good at it; and both dealing with the struggle of balancing the two endeavors. Further thanks to Richard for the pointer back to the post where he discussed this issue. An excellent post, as most of his usually are. (And, sorry, Maria. Richard’s right about the song. It’s by Stephen Stills).

In reading their comments, I found myself transported back to my student days and all those Lit classes (I minored in English)—and I recalled that so many of the writers we studied kept journals and engaged in prolific letter writing. Clearly, they would have been bloggers had the medium existed.

My old college buddy, the poet Clayton Eshleman, a real workhorse who has 37 of his books listed on Amazon, once told me that his correspondence and journals are a critical seedbed for much of his work. I suspect that he, too, would have been a blogger, and that it would have been an important adjunct to his work That he isn’t one now is probably due to the unfortunate tendency of most of my age peers to be set in their ways.

I don’t know if these observations are helpful or not, but there they are for what they’re worth.