A poem a day and other more specific resolutions

In spite of my decision to do rather than to resolve that I outlined last night (right before the awful bass started up again, prompting me to make two trips upstairs to have my knocking on the door ignored, and nearly necessitating another night of sleeping on the floor of my living room and much angst), I am also thinking in terms of some more specific ideas for supporting my overall intention to live for myself. Many of these take the form of more traditional "resolutions"--for instance, I'm joining the gym my friend Caroline goes to on Monday and we are going to be responsible for helping each other get back in the habit of going. (Personally, I think that once the semester starts I'll be shooting for a minimum of twice a week, since it's not somewhere I can walk to.) I let my membership at the Erstwhile Teaching College gym lapse once I wasn't teaching there and no longer could keep my workout clothes in my desk--plus, it became really out of the way when I started teaching at Not-NYU, which doesn't have its own gym facilities. And I do feel better when I'm going to the gym at least occasionally. There are also things about keeping my apartment in better shape, buying a few things that will improve my life in concrete and necessary ways (one of those alarm clocks that gradually makes the room brighter, an external hard drive for my Mac, an electrostatic mop so I don't have to keep buying Swiffer sheets, and so on).

One thing I just thought of this morning, however. One of the more famous stories about Robert Browning is that he made a New Year's resolution to write a poem a day in 1853. He kept this resolution for roughly three days, but one of the poems that came out of it was "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. I don't write poetry, but I do--of course--write about poetry. I tell people that I got into the field I did because it made me happy; that's something I feel like I've lost sight of over the past couple of years as I've started to go pro, as it were, with the exception of a few emotionally fraught late-night recitations of Maud and "Dejection: An Ode." So my version of Browning's resolution is this: I will read a new poem every day in 2009, starting now. Obviously, many of these will be poems related in some way to my work, and there will be days when I no doubt will read many new poems for reasons other than this resolution. But I want this to be somewhat separate, even as I leave room for it to serve multiple ends. The only reason for doing this is to stay in touch with the reasons why I'm doing this in the first place, beyond the specific instrumentality of the dissertation. I'm also going to try to record this here--even if it's just noting the name of the poem and a brief description, as I'm probably going to do today. Probably the quickest way to fail in this would be to expect to have brilliant close readings about everything.

I'm starting with a Browning poem, because I'm reading a lot of Browning these days anyway. ("A Death in the Desert" was incredibly haunting--possibly in ways that will make me rethink the basic chapter proposal.) And so:

Robert Browning, "Confessions" (1864--originally in Dramatis Personae). Short poem of 36 lines in nine stanzas...speaker is a man on his deathbed talking to his confessor, remembering the world not as a "vale of tears" but recalling instead trysts with a girl in his youth, evading the eyes of everyone in her house to meet her in the lane...joys of evasion, perhaps? (The dying man as a recurring scene for RB--of course there's "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" and "A Death in the Desert" but also an image in "Childe Roland"....) Most interesting, perhaps is the speaker's use of the line of "physic bottles" on a nearby table to evoke the "suburb lane"--mentioning the Ether bottle twice, the second time in a way that somewhat collapses the referential levels: "As she left the attic, there, / By the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,' / And stole from stair to stair."