On the Search for the Genuine

About this Blog

I originally founded this blog as a prep exercise before asking my freshman students to blog in a first-year writing course at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.  At the time, I was just getting into new media writing and digital rhetoric, and I felt it was hypocritical to ask my students to blog without blogging myself.  Over time, this blog has evolved into a place where I share interesting stuff, mostly with people who land here from my Twitter Feed or from my favorite horsie message boards.

Who are these people you keep mentioning?

Jen would be me.  Chris is my husband.  Here we are at my friend Jeanne’s wedding in 2006:

Button is our cat, whom we got from Purrfect Pawsibilities of Whitmore Lake, MI.  She was supposed to be a foster cat, but she was so damn great that we kept her.  You can see why:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhI75skeKF8]

Skyler, aka Against the Wind, is my horse.  For the horse nerds who got to this blog by clicking through my Chronicle of the Horse Forums profile, Skyler is a 15.3hh unraced Thoroughbred eventing horse.  If you want to see him in action, I blog video footage of him now and again:

What’s with the blog name “On the Search for the Genuine”?

I’ve written all my life for fun and pleasure, but I got more seriously into poetry as an undergrad at the University of Virginia, after which I went to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor on fellowship to get an MFA in Poetry.  My favorite poet, hands down, is Elizabeth Bishop, and she in turn was inspired by her hands-down favorite poet, Marianne Moore.  While I usually strongly dislike poetry about poetry (aka ars poetica as it’s known to poetry nerds), Marianna Moore’s poetry is perhaps the most succinct, well-worded expression of why poetry matters in the English language.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician–
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important.

Read the rest of the poem here, if you like it as much as I do.

Search