Love & Form

1. Someone at this moment makes a choice for love. For the sake of love, their own love, from desire, loneliness, perhaps a sort of ideal. A choice between going or staying, saying something or not. Someone makes a choice which may go along way in defining his or her life and others' - the born and unborn. By the time I have finished this paragraph, someone else will choose.

Form is the the fact of having chosen. Implementation of form is an artistic right. It is how one announces choice. A form can be a shape, pattern, or process.

Form is choosing captured as choice.

The difference is as simple as reading and remembering. One chooses to read. One may remember one's reading, a complex form created out of the text, one's feelings having read the text, and one's understanding or feelings toward the author of the text. I say, I love Keats. But I do not know Keats. I have read poems and letters purported to be written by Keats, and I have impressions of John Keats as a person, and I possess personal recollections, such as first reading John Keats' poems earnestly, closely in Washington Square, in Greenwich Village in NY City, on a spring day after work at the Strand, in 1983. I have created a form including all these things. I can revisit and implement this form at will. And, I can revise this form. I can choose to read a poem written by John Keats and tell myself, "I am only reading a poem written by John Keats. I will think about this poem in light of an essay written by Georges Bataille." I have made a choice of having chosen, a form within a form. I may write about this particular reading. Another choice, or means of capture, another form.

2. A man revisits choosing captured as choice every day, the narrative being more or less pronounced, but always authentic, for he feels love. He can go no further than choice, for he has chosen. He thinks he remembers when he chose. It is complicated remembering exactly when, there are so many factors, but surely he knew, he knew when he was in love where moments before he had not been in love. Yes, he is sure of it now, right now. He is almost there, back when he fell in love.

The form of choice is that close.

Murray Christmas

I am involved in a writing project that has lasted about two months now and may go on for several more. The pieces are prose poems in box form, which read literally and/or figuratively. The pleasure is for readers who like to feel themselves slipping from the literal to the figurative and back again. The slipping in these poems can be surprising, or humorous - not disconcerting, so much. I hope they are informative, on some level, though I couldn't say why.

This post though is a real time attempt to describe or isolate a particular phenomenon in writing which I have experienced several times. Perhaps you have too. I will be more or less sailing along in my work, reading and rereading it as I continue writing new poems, editing as I go - la di da - when for one reason or another I become conscious of wanting to write some particular kind of poem, often as a way of "broadening" or "testing the limits" of the project I am working on. I become wrapped up in this poem (in this last incident I was mentally AWOL for about 2 weeks). Once I finish it, I continue on, only the subsequent poems are off-kilter, boring, wrong. Of course, I go looking about my life, consciously and unconsciously, like a blind lunatic seeking why I feel so off. After a time I come back and see that I went off track with that one "testing" poem. I kick that and other since-written poems off the stack, start in again, and am back on track.

As I said, this sort of thing has happened to me several times. Getting back on track is a thing of beauty and relief of course, and perhaps the entire scenario is exactly the "testing" I and the project were bound to incur.

And, having said that, I believe it. No writer's complaints from me today.

Murray Christmas, as my son says to his friend, Murray.

Six Tenets of Hope and Form

A. Clear tendencies end unclearly. Desire outstrips capacity. One visits content; one does not mirror content. The truth of an idea does not entitle the bearer to the form of truth.

B. Hope sustains us when removed from content. In content, transit and communication are active. The application of "Hope" in transit bespeaks false tendencies.

C. In the transit of form there is choice but not hope.

D. Hope occurs outside of form.

E. Hope is the application of the person to the idea of form.

F. We are nothing without form; we are less than nothing without hope.