Juvenilia

Instead of blogging as often as a good blogger should, I have been wading through some of my earlier posts --my juvenilia. It's amazing that one can be so embarassingly stupid -- and still live to blog about it. Not that I seriously think I've ever been embarassingly stupid here (are we counting this post?), but I just think that it is interesting that my views have changed, thanks in large part to many of you.

I am always a bit saddened when I come across people whose views don't change. I do not think that there is a correlation to age here. Younger people can be obstinate, and older people can be open-minded. At any rate, to always have the same view of "what Asian-American poetry is..." strikes me as sad.

I think that my favorite thinkers and poets are in a perpetual state of juvenilia. They never grow old to me, because they have never grown old to themselves. They are able to adapt and improve themselves and their poems, which I admire.

It must be because deep down inside they feel that they have not attained the ideal of having written great poetry. There must be an insatisfaction, a hunger, that drives them into originality in both the thinking about the art of poetry and the act of writing the poem itself.

And I think that we who try to claim the mantle of "intellectualism," as I once did in an earlier post, should try not to adhere to "a" single view our whole lives. Because the foundation of intellectualism is not dogmaticism. The foundation is a quest towards greater understanding, and understanding is an infinity loop.