The giggle of eyelashes*

In graduate school I learned to sing the body electric. The program I attended was more about souls and songs and art and heart and expression than it was about lectures and footnotes and appendices and theses. We created and explored. We put font to music. We made books and paper and poetry.

At first, I balked at the artsy fartsyness of it all. I wanted to be a serious student, with serious success, large textbooks, late nights at the library over microfiche, bibliographic complexity. Instead I got professors who encouraged us to open class with an African blessing to the dawn, who wanted artistic presentations on feminist gods, who expected me to dig, dig, dig deep into wells of pain and self and remembrance and hope to create art. It was all so much kumbaya and not enough cross-referencing. At first. But gradually, with eye-rolls and exasperated huffs and hesitant inchings toward release, I succumbed to the power in their poetry, the worth of their wonder. And I'm a better writer for it.

Today's blogger reminds me of that time in graduate school, when I sloughed off some of that rigid academia to embrace the tickle of words. Maya at One Paragraph at a Time is a poet who would have fit in nicely with my crowd of wordmongers in graduate school.

I hesitate to tell you her blog is almost entirely poetry. But wait! I know. I thought the same thing at first. A whole blog? Over four years of posts? With nothing but poetry? Pass. But stick with me here because Maya can write some damn poetry. I actually like it. Kind of a lot. Her writing is contemplative and introspective and deliberate and lovely and tactile and thoughtful. She writes about nostalgia and sex ("he was all hers, one locked muscle of utter fealty") and lies. Her poetry is honest and mature and revealing. Every word is revered, precisely chosen, and treasured.

I just read an entire blog of poetry. I can't believe it, either, but I did. And I loved it. Oh, the template is boring, and Maya could stand to roll up her archives. But the template doesn't even matter because her artistry is on the screen, in those words I want to roll around on my tongue, those words that delight my eyes. This is not some angsty teenage blithering with rhymed, insipid dreck. This is real, this is art, and this is good.








*My title is stolen from Maya @ One Paragraph at a Time.

"When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave"

I didn't know how to start this review. For the first paragraph or so of my reviews, I generally like to pull out some piece of the personality or experience of the blogger I'm reviewing to relate to or make fun of. I think of how their lives relate or don't relate to mine, I tell a charming or embarrassing story from my past, I make fun of myself and them, I tell you who I am and who they are: pretty much I find some way to make it about me, too. Because I'm just that self-centered. Also it makes for good story telling. Don't tell me it doesn't because I won't believe you (Remember? Self-centered.).

I feel like over the past year or so of reviewing blogs I've started to know what I'm doing. I've been feeling rather old-hat, really: like I've seen it all now, the good blogs and the terrible blogs and the blogs that are getting by but need some work. There haven't been all that many surprises for me lately, and the reviews come quick and dirty and easily. More often than not, frankly, I feel better than the unwashed blogging masses, which sounds really puffed up and full of myself, and, guess what, I am sometimes. (Both better than the unwashed masses and full of myself, at the same time and independent of the other. I'm also over-explainy and unduly fond of parentheticals.)

But this week I struggled.

First impressions: Nice design, organized, good about page, love the tabs and the FAQs, hate the ads, but in today's economy I'm becoming more lax on that (shill!). The archives are all tidy, but I don't like how they automatically roll back up -- sometimes static wins.

Digging in: The dating chronicles are amusing, although she reveals a slight tendency toward superficiality, which is probably forgivable under the auspices of online dating. Also, she realizes she has issues, and I like people who own their foibles. She wears Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume, which is my absolute fave (I wear their O). But I can't figure out whey she sometimes writes "noh" instead of "no."

I want to read the entire thing from the beginning, which is a good sign, although there is a marked gap between 2004 and 2008. Anna, I'd like a bit of a re-introduction when you start blogging again in 2008 -- what happened in the meantime? Now all the sudden there's a kid and a husband.

There are posts about things and products and such, which is fine by me. I'm a material girl and I like a review once in a while. And, true to her tag line, there are pop cultural references (I've never watched a single episode of John & Kate, but I don't have to -- the internet tells me all I need to know.) and thoughts about being a mother that in no way step over the line into dreaded cutesy mommy blogger territory.

Here's where my struggle comes in: I feel like I can't really critique her. Anna has got this shit down. She posts often, she writes so very well, she's insightful and charming and she's got a blog design that works and matches her personality. I like her. A lot. If I didn't have all this pesky work to do, I'd have pulled up close and clicked through her entire oeuvre. I no doubt will at some point. She strikes a balance between revealing herself in bits and pieces and just downright entertaining us. She's a smartypants and she knows it but isn't all sneery about it, and I love that. But she's also totally neurotic and acerbic and funny and honest, which I love even more. I find myself in the unenviable position of wishing she'd review my blog instead of the other way around. I figure she can teach me a thing or two.