Important in Common

A poet friend heading out to a performance by a local band (an all-female Led Zeppelin cover band, if you must know) suggested I come along. I deferred for now, but this got me to thinking about what we do and what we have to show for it.

I suppose, if you write, and you continue to write, you have yourself to show as a writer for what you do, having written. I would say about 90% of what there is to show for being a writer is held in common to all who write: they, themselves, as writers, and the work they have produced. Add to that friendships with other writers. Add to that the occasional glimmer of recognition in whatever form that all writers can recount for themselves: small, scattered publications, a reading, a friend asking for advice on a cover letter - and I should not forget perhaps the greatest reward, that of reading other's books as one who has written or at least made real efforts in that direction.

We have gone a ways here in describing all writers. It remains to distinguish those who publish books, who are reviewed, who have careers and perhaps teach. All this I would say is something like 5% of what a writer can be. It is a terrifically important 5%, no doubt, and critical no doubt for the writers who experience these forms of the writerly life - and certainly all writers are grateful for the success of a few given the nature of the writing itself. This is important to keep in mind, that the success of John Ashbery, for example, is not owning to the person of Ashbery, John but to the quality and effect of the work he produced.

All writers have in common the process and effect, the life of writing. Life seen through the lens of one who can write either about it or from it is something different than otherwise; but this is true also of one who can paint or take good photographs. Perhaps too of people who can dunk a basketball. My point though, or the purpose of this small essay, is to point out what all writers share not whether they can dunk a basketball, though I'm sure there are some who can. Writers who experience the 5% that I will call, for lack of a more clever term, success, share also in the 95% I have described as the life in common to all writers. Logically, I may have more in common with John Donne than with Shaquille O'Neill, and although that sentence makes my head spin a bit it is true as far as it goes in acknowledging the writer's practice as recognizing (and not "defining") who one is in relation to the world.

As a young writer I was very taken up with what I would have to show for being a writer. I almost assumed I would conquer worlds. And if I have done so it's news to me. They would have had to be terribly fragile, mysterious worlds, the kind that are frightened into nothingness at the turn of a page. I have made my peace with all that, as writers do, eventually, even if it has to wait for the first drop of earth on an oaken box, but what a nice surprise it was to be asked to see a band by my poet friend, simply because we are both writers and have known each other for years, and are friends, and share some of the same friends, and trust each other the way people do who have something important in common.

Poems, Think. Think, Poems, Thoughts.

Not thinking is not a crime, and no one doesn't think. No one you know does not think and you think thinkingly or not. We are all alike this way, alike and true and free. Free in being, in thinking.

Thinking is not evinced (made evidential; trace leaving; culpable; guilty; condemned)  in the thought thought but in the thinking thought. The product is not necessarily even the result of the process because many oh so many other processes are involved before we have a product that we can agree is a product. A product of what? Exactly.

When we argue - and even agreements are a kind of argument - we point to thinking, thinkingly or not, not to varying degrees so much but in the way we point to preferred sections of a color spectrum. Do you think this way? You may as well have been a robin laying speckled eggs.

Because we argue or die tryingly we continue to speak as if thought were, well, not a solution, but a gateway or key to solutions. I know people so beholden to thought that they have never had children. I know children whose thoughts are to their parents' thoughts what Pavarotti's voice was to when his parents would argue. No one can stand anything without taking time to think about it and this is what matters when we talk about freedom.

At some point, you will want to put aside mere facts and do some thinking. You will want to wrap up your facts in a little blanket you fashioned from an old flannel pillowcase and, humming, lay them to sleep, then tip-toe out and away to do some thinking while the night is still young.

I do not know if you want to consider anything. That seems pointless at times like these. I do not mean time in the political sense but the stereoscopic sense, where the colors blend to reinforce and challenge each other. Time in the Sam Francis or Helen Frankenthaler sense, but you can think what you like.

Every thought will find its way.
Every thought is a nightmare.
The thought not thought is the life not lived.
Thinking rearranges the keys.

In my mind, we meet and are happy simply to meet. Everything is blank thereafter. You can't expect sense where thinking is involved, and even for those thoughts that tend toward sense, you will be no wiser than when you started out. Who is the man who does not think, or the thought that cannot feel? We were original once. Everything else is like starting out with a thought.

I think a thought and thoroughly

I think what I will do now is send out poems to magazines. I have a few new poems and I will send them out and wait to see if they are taken. If not, I will send them to another magazine. While waiting, I may write one or two more poems. Over time I will accumulate a pool of poems for sending out to magazines. After a time, I will probably publish these poems in one of my books, unless the poems are unimaginably popular, in which case somebody else can publish them.

I will do all this because Endi does this - the sending out to magazines - and I want us to do things together. She is much better and more diligent poet than I am, so I will send to magazines that she has painstakingly vetted and culled from the literary maelstrom.

I have said what I will do, and I will not do anything else. I will not read the magazines I am sending too. I will not give readings. I will not talk about my writing when I meet other poets, unless they ask, and they never do. They think all I really care about these days is my family and religion, and they are right.

But I do care about poetry and other art-making activities for what they can do to relate truth and beauty, and to bring us closer together. Writing poems and sending them out and generally behaving like a normal poet because your wife does so seems like a reasonable, pleasant, positive activity.

Don't you agree?

Art and Promise

Can art change the world? No, but it can suggest what needs to change. Art can motivate us to change the world. The question is, what will we do to fulfill the promises of art?

What is art? Art is (A) the choice not to do anything other than art, at least for the time it takes to make art, and (B) the thing or notion or event that has been created in that time. If everyone made art there would be less conflict and fewer wars. That is probably true, though artists or at least poets are fond of arguing. Still, one cannot force people to make art or legislate such a thing, and arguments among artists are at most a distraction. The world little notes what a person thinks about what they do.

We try though, in subtle ways, to suggest that people should be creative to make art, to be original, to express their inner selves, etc. And this is good in some ways, but while the rest of us are pondering art projects those in power are pondering how to acquire more power. And the wonder is that everyone is  successful. There is more art in the world now, I think - visual renderings, books, music - all to various purposes and offerings differing degrees of interest - than ever before, while power is held by fewer persons than ever before. And, unlike art, power is pure. There is no good, bad, or indifferent power. It delivers on its purpose every time.

Is art then simply a form of consolation or promise? Is it, after all, our modern religion, the thing we turn to as we once turned to prayer? Holding on to hope, plying the keyboard, the sable brush, the stylus, as once we fingered the beads of the Rosary? I think so. I think that art is, after all, a form of consolation and promise. No art is the exact form or model for what the world should be if the world were just, but in an unjust world art, like prayer, is the most suitable form for stating for ourselves what the world should be. I should say art and prayer can be that, but not all art and not all prayers are necessarily oriented toward a just society. We should be careful as individuals and as a society not to treat all art as sacred, nor all prayers as holy. There is a great deal of personal interest that enters into our prayers and our art.

But we will make art, aiming at what is true art. We will not call it holy or sacred, but we will aim to make it true. We know that what is true is holy, but we are not the ones to judge. We will do our part. We make art because no activity serves so well to put what's in our heart before all mankind. And we will continue to pray, in word or spirit, because no activity serves so well to put what's in our heart before God. We care for our neighbor and we serve the truth. It is all really very simple.

And what about change? That too is a personal and communal decision. We cannot be mere entertainment or solace. We must endeavor to own, to a just degree - neither too much or too little - the tools we use to create and the means by which we live. We must set an example, not only in rendering the truth of the human heart, its consolations and promise, but in acting to turn that promise into a reality. Poverty, war, violence, and greed insult the heart. As long as they exist, we have failed art as we have failed the truth.

Therefore, I would like to suggest an expansion of the definition of art. Art is (A) the choice not to do anything other than art, at least for the time it takes to make art, (B) the thing or notion or event that has been created in that time, and (C) art is what is done about the art, or how we follow through. If we merely visit art - on the museum wall, in a chapbook, on Facebook postings - and do nothing to seize the power that guarantees freedom for all humankind, then we will have lost time and opportunity while other consolidate and strengthen their hold on an unjust world. We will be guilty of compliance, voicing empty prayers from broken hearts.

Poems in Ordinary Time

On the one side is what we recall, on the other is our hopes. We occupy, or say we do, a constantly shifting middle ground called "now." Or are we occupied by it? Who's the host in this arrangement and who is the guest?

You may fall in love or you may sign a contract. You will want to fall in love and then sign a contract.  You do not want to be signing contracts that look like love but are not love. You do not need to put yourself under self-induced obligations to anyone or anything other than the few, the very few things you love. I do not need to tell you what you love. You can tell me. But I may say to you, Then why are you contracted to this thing that is not among the things you love? And you may say, Oh, I love that too. And I will say, I wonder if that is strictly true, or have opened the door to the slippery slope of disregard, by which many false, sad contracts are signed? Love is not accommodation, though can love and be accommodating.

Failure is not a thing one needs to induce or enter into in order to know the world or the love of the world. It may seem that way, by way of explanation or making excuses for ourselves, but it is not strictly true. Nothing is true which must be known by failing to get at another thing. You say, Failure made me humble. I say, do not treat humility as the offspring of failure. Failure made you aware of the sadness you carry within. You looked with yourself, having nowhere else to turn, and recognized sadness. Did you realize then that we all suffer in this way? That is a great gift and accomplishment, but it was not the result of failure. Instead, failure was the result of the sadness you could not bear. You acted as if you could not afford to be sad but now here you are. Now you know that you have nothing to fear as long as you remember that sadness within you. If you can keep in mind the sadness of others you will see failures for merely being failures. One does not need to fail in order to know the world, but the world knows us despite our failure to know ourselves.

Properly speaking, there is nothing that does not exist. Even dreams are an effect or property of effect. The idea of a thing exists as that idea. A saxophone-playing bicycle. Simple. I am interested in the notion that one can escape in dreams when of course there is no escape. Failure may overwhelm you and so dreams are a practical means of defeating that failure. A starving man needs bread; a failed man needs dreams. I take dreams quite literally as I do any signpost. There is no harm in this sort of conservative investment. Discounting dreams is a tactic employed by people who are inclined to over-invest in other fantasies, such as purpose and power. Purpose and power are as real as dreams, of course, but over-investment contorts the boundaries of purpose and power and creates fantasies and, often, poor behavior. Dreamers are likely to be better behaved than fantasizers. Or, one is bound to behave better dreaming. A dreamer has a goal to work toward, while a fantasizer misshapes and corrupts the form and nature of a thing that, for all we know, may serve as another person's dream. So, while there is nothing that does not exist, there are some things that should not exist. But even these things exist and serve a purpose, describing not paths so much as boundary limits.

One who loves posits the question whether they are loved in return. One who hates does so at no risk to themselves.

Hate is a means for evading the question, Do you love me too?

It is 2018, or Time for Now

This could be a story, sitting where I am writing, or the poem of what's written being here before me. This may be the middle part of a column - I mean a column intended to support another structure - which the eye travels past, from the bottom to the top, from the top to the bottom.

This may not be a wave. I do not allow it permission to be the fact of the potential for breaking toward the shore. Oh wave. You broke and the pieces were absorbed. You did not really break at all.

All of this is based on shoddy research, the best research. Research you did not even know you were collecting until it occurred to you to write conclusions, and a conclusion is not a false hope. Have some respect for false conclusions.

Projection, too, is not a conclusion or false hope. So many ways we interfere with process. You may only occupy the middle part of a column that never made it past the gates. Praise.

But we project pictures at least these days, being interfered with. I say we project pictures, snapshots of daily occurrences. Crossing the street, newscasts. You call what you see interesting or provoking, banking on the kindness of neighboring events. It could be a warning that we are at our best while asleep.

I see constant turnover, recycling projections. The sound sound sound of light. The sort of advertising that puts no one off. That problem. That disposition.

Now, I'm not about to change your mind, and that's not my purpose anyway. I have no interest in replacing one thing with another thing. What I'm doing here is its own excuse, deciding what key to hit. I felt an urge, a strong urge. I think that much is clear.

But I have no will to interfere.