Reading Myself Writing about Washing Machines

I don't read myself very often. Once something is published, that's it. I'm not interested. Yet when I do come across something and read it, I get a strange frisson. Of course I am not objective, but I often find something that I have written that is very good, standing up fine to my own standards. I really ought to do this more often, because when I think about my work in the abstract, I tend to undervalue it. If it is something I have written a long while ago, I can get a sense of its quality in a way I can't for something written yesterday.

 A few days ago, it was an article I published in Spanish in 2010 on a poem by Claudio Rodríguez, "Manuscrito de una respiración." We were all asked by Philip Silver to choose a poem of Claudio to write about. This is not a publication that I am well known for. As far as I know it has never been cited, and I've never even had a conversation with anyone about it, not even Silver. Perhaps some of the other contributors to the book have read it; I don't know. There are other articles in the book, some worse than mine, some on the same level or better.

I used an image I found in a drumming manual about the rhythm of machines in laundromats, how the rhythm of the washers and dryers is regular, but the clothes rise and fall in irregular patterns. This is analogous to the drumming of Jack DeJohnette, whose metaphor this is, and also to the rhythms of Rodríguez's poem. This other article in the book that talks about prosody, but a poet who is also a profesor de métrica, does so in a dull way, basically counting the number of syllables in lines and commenting on that. I will stand behind my washing machine metaphor.