This is a blog post I guess

Hi poets. I'm Jon Willer. Class of '10, living in Whitman, need to do a load of laundry later today.

I'm an English (writing) and history major. History was neat when I was learning about stuff that happened (massacres in Canada over beef jerky and Stakhanovism and Oscar Wilde's libel suit and stuff) but is getting progressively less neat now that I'm in upper level classes and am supposed to find documents and order musty old books from Colgate and use Chicago citation, the bane of my citing existence. I'm almost finished with the major but I think after undergrad it's going to end up being a hobby more than anything.

Writing, on the other hand, is endlessly fun for me. Even if I had stuck with my original plan of pre-med, I would probably be writing all the time for my personal enjoyment, and if I can get course credit for it so much the better, you know?

I'm from Norwood, which is about half an hour north of here. We have a barbershop and a Sugarcreek. Basically the most exciting things to do are look in the Courier-Observer to see which of my high school classmates are going to jail, and shoot b-b guns in my friend Parker's garage while he welds stuff. The Hometown Cafe has totally kickass poutine and peanut butter pie, though.

I like walking and playing Tetris and loathing Bobby Flay. I enjoy watching professional bowling and the films of Michael Haneke. I like Michel Foucault a whole lot, even when I have no clue what the dude's trying to say. I'm fascinated by obsolescent and outmoded things, and using them out of context (http://sodapopquiz.blogspot.com if you want to see what I'm talking about, plus a smidgen of my poetry). Music is pretty great, too; lately I've been into a lot of lo-fi and noise stuff, plus New Zealand music of all stripes (http://last.fm/user/general_tso for details).

My workshop experiences at St. Lawrence have, by and large, blown. It's not that I haven't received positive feedback; it's just that the vast majority of critiques seem to end up being, "It's good, don't change anything," or, "You used too many big words, I had to use a dictionary." Even if you get complimented it's frustrating if you don't get any criticism that helps you to revise. I'm hoping we can all do our best to have useful advice for each other.

One living poet I definitely admire would be David Berman. I've read a lot of poetry I like, but his collection Actual Air is poetry that actually makes me jealous. The details are crisp, they're witty and poignant, and his voice is distinctive and confident. I like T.S. Eliot's precision, but not the aridity, and Charles Bukowski's terseness, though I feel despite that his poems still suffer from some dead weight. I consider the other Dirty Realists like Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver influences as well, though I know them more from fiction than poetry.

In my Techniques of Fiction class, somebody said one day, "I like this poem because it's so vague;" my views on poetry are the exact opposite. I think good poetry gets its power from specificity. Even when dealing with the abstract or surreal, attention to detail is key.

In this class, I'd like to learn how to experiment more with form and style. Looking through the anthologies of contemporary poetry we'll be reading, I saw that poets are going in many different exciting directions. I think this will be an opportunity to be more adventurous with my work.

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to a good semester.