Concrete Formalist Poetry

Writing in Returns

2012-01-29T13:16:00.000-08:00

I have a theory (I have had lots of theories, and you probably have too. They reoccur from time to time) that one can write or communicate anything, anything at all, even by beginning in a completely different place from the thing you wish to communicate and returning to that place. This theory is founded on the none too radical assumptions that the act of communication is in itself meaningful, and that meaning is transmitted through direct and indirect means. The terms and variations of direct and indirect communication are many, as are the boats on the river, though perhaps not the fish of the sea, and certainly not as the grains of sand. I do not allude here to stream of consciousness writing, but to starting at a point as if at random, and proceeding by the eddies and currents of an apparently neglectfully manned craft, to arrive at a precise point on a distant shore; even one cloaked in fog. For what is writing if not a sort of landscape comprised of fits and starts, peaks and valleys outlined in black on the page, a topography at once absolute in identifying the word of the thing represented, yet utterly foreign to the eye, or to the mind of the reader who has not yet arrived?

An act, therefore, in the name of this theory: but first, I must apologize. I should be a scholar and do my research and some pure thinking on this matter so that I can point out examples of the kind if writing I mean, or present like-minded theories, etc. If I can't be bothered to carry out these sorts of duties I should at the very least take pains to write something so compelling that no one will be able to resist what I already know. But you see, I can do neither of these things. I cannot explain more than I have, and I can only write so well. My theory is a small theory. It sits in among other theories, most of which are much bigger and already have strong followings. My theory has me for its voice; and, yes, perhaps there are neighboring theories and authors with whom I should join; with whom, if I were to take the time to link arms and our fates, we might take our place with the great theories that rule this place. But, again, I must apologize and say, I am a father and husband, an inordinately simple man who finds that the most he can do is the best he can do, which is to state what he is capable of stating in the small time allotted to him, in the small space of the world in which he lives.

An act, therefore (see how I announce our departure, which should be counted in my favor or not, as the reader will, for I cannot judge for the reader or offer opinions in lieu of a general readership); as like a stone, I was turned against my will, for I had none that I would give that name, by a hand that had no author, or that wrote in no language I understood, as if seated at my leisure - call it a break in the day - under a tree past flowering; see we have our errors and our ways, but there is work to do today. Children came past who turned toward us and were suddenly transformed before our eyes into young men and women, dressed variously but speaking as if united to a common cause, when they dispersed - some into houses, other turning this way and that; along a road, perhaps, this one leading to the city. I think I told you about my life in the city. I recall how I appeared to myself, for instance in a mirror, a sideways glance at a mirror, which was all the time I had to contemplate what might become of me. But noise and lights took me away that night and for many nights, until I woke to the landscapes of both the outward and interior eye, the ship's cabin tossing too and for until I thought it would be dislodged from the ship itself, and I could imagine myself floating like that, alone in the cabin of a ship, until the sea had simply swallowed me out of boredom from the play of keeping me afloat.

But every day was like that, so I learned not to complain as one wears one shirt, not two. Form and repetition perhaps are the signals of staying; undertaken and sustained, survival is proclaimed joy - the seed bearing the fruit, the fruit providing sustenance for the body, the eye. A long journey only some of which is written down here. At the time, we were often too overcome with trails and exhaustion to note the particulars. But his journal, this pen I return to you in the condition in which it was given to me, bearing only superficially the marks of wear.

Thank you for reading this. In honor of return I will try and blog again soon.

Thought and Faith in Thought in Form

2012-01-13T20:43:00.000-08:00

One must work to keep oneself (a) honest and (2) surprised. This work can take many a twist, nay, many-a. Lately, and for lack of anything better to occupy myself, I have put away middle-aged things and convened at the point of faith. For background, I have for many years relied on a faith-by-belief position which lately has sagged and flagged, not for any reasons except that it seemed arrogant to maintain such a personally-preferred status when all the world is going to meeting. I mean, if poets can publish their own books, and gays fight to marry, and people can camp out for financial clarity, I really ought to find a church. Simple enough.
I thought about here and there (Episcopals v. Romans) and decided to go whole-hog, being one who likes commitment (see the ring, the boy, the forms) and besides is on-board with the Trinity. So I went to St. Stephens over here in the Southeast and loved it, and I kept going and love it more, and I have been going every week, and going to adult catechism classes, and praying the Rosary among others, and just having a ball.

It's a lot like C.B.G.B. back in the day but without the hangover.

If you want strange, join the Catholics. I knew Christianity was paradox-driven by the RC's are seemingly compelled to layer, offset, and baffle. I am convinced that fundamentalism is in large part driven by those who don't get RC and can't stand not getting it. Ontological Luddites, let's say. And as far as social aspects of the weirdness goes, I am happy to report that my positions are unchanged and in fact glorified, and I am happy to discuss them: abortion is a right; same-sex marriage is a right. Neighborly love and humility should leave us no choice. Thank you.

But anyway. The thing I want to write about involves Baptism (Capitalizing is big in all its forms), Saints, and dreams.

So. When you (or I) are baptized I will have the opportunity to name one or two patron saints. These should be highly prized individuals you adore, relate to, emulate. I felt groundless and while planning to drop in on the local RC bookstore laid in a proper prayer to God himself for help and guidance, promising a cache of one thousand prayers for the souls in purgatory if he helps out (like I said, whole-hog).

The next night, I had this dream.

I was in the lower level of a building, the interior of which was white stucco walls and old wooden stairs and moldings, which I took to be a restaurant. It was very clean. There was a knock at the door, which opened, and in walks Mervyn Fergusen.

Merv was the doorman/co-proprietor/dean of C.B.G.B. He was famous for wearing a construction hat while working. He was Scot born, Cambridge-educated, a lover of Bach, a connoisseur of all sorts, and he thought kids were the best even when they drove him mad. He was also a devoted atheist being quite unhappy with God for, among other things, the Holocaust. Point taken. He and I were close. He introduced me to T.S. Eliot's poetry, David Hume's writings, and generally was a great guy. Merv died in 1982 of colon cancer, having hidden himself away from everyone except closest family, not wanting to make a fuss.
But as I said, in walks Merv, bare-headed with a look of sadness or utter longing. A person pops their head out and after confusing Merv with me (as far as who had been outside) says we can go upstairs. So we go up these nice old wooden stairs to the ground floor.

*This dream is a trip. Read on. Sorry if it weirds you out. If it helps, I understand. The Catholic Church is rife with idiots, felons, sex fiends, and impostors. It's crimes are legendary. But then, I do not believe in the Catholic Church. I believe in God.*

Anyhoo - as I reach the top up the stairs (Merv drops out from the rest of the dream), a monk comes toward me, looks me in the eye, and passes by to my right. He is dressed in a brown robe, white belt. His hands are gathered in an attitude of prayer. A voice says his name is "Petronius."

Petronius. Keep that in mind.

I am now on the ground floor - same walls, lost of light - where a number of people are gathered, who I take to be waitstaff, cooks, and hosts for the restaurant, which I now understood to be in fact an utterly transformed C.B.G.B. They were all tasting wine which was to be served that night as a way of educating them for their customers. Very professional. The owner is there, and he says, "Actually, Patrick chose the wine."

At this point I was starting to wake up from sleep, but the dream was so strong it kept going. People looked at me and smiled. I nodded, and I woke up out of the dream.

It is about 5:00 AM. I lay there for a moment then said ten prayers to God to have mercy on the soul of Mervyn Fergusen, which I am more or less convinced may be languishing in Purgatory. Jesus what the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks is going on. I get up and go to my computer and look up "Petronious." I see the noted Latin satirist by that name, Fail. Then I see Saint Petronious.

Saint Petronius is an obscure Saint, unless you live in Bologna, Italy, of which he is the patron Saint. I mean to say that his name is not on the current Church Calendar of Saints. He was born in the early fifth century and died 457, I believe. He was born to a noble Roman family and converted to Christianity. He travelled to Africa and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He was a noted ascetic and a "man of good virtue." He was made Bishop of Bologna, Italy. While Bishop, he retained his ascetic habits. He is noted for building a great cathedral on the model of the churches of Jerusalem. The Cathedral was dedicated to Saint Stephen.

Someone once told me that Catholics don't believe in coincidence. Well, I do. But I also believe in God. So, when I pray to God for guidance in naming a Saint, and I have a dream that includes a monk, and the monk is named "Petronius," and it turns out that there is a Saint Petronius who was a monk, who built a St. Stephens church, and the church I go to is St. Stephens. And, when the whole look and feel indicates that this is a seminal dream, and I weep to my wife as a recount it; and, even knowing that the unconscious/symbolic/archetypal form of C.B.G.B.'s - a problematic, mixed, dark place - has been transformed into a place of light; I say, given all this, I feel grateful and not a little awed. All this, and I am not even Baptized.

Well, what's next. My research yielded no clear results for dreams of Saints. I spoke to my priest who was impressed but counseled me to choose a Saint on the Calendar (the St. Stephen priest is about my age. He escaped from N. Vietnam under threat of death for practicing his beliefs and from what I know of him is very, very special. Just a great guy and devoted and solid in a way that takes my breath away).

At this point I was going purely on gut. I was glad I spoke to my priest, at St. Stephens. I went to daily Mass that evening at St. Mary'sCathedral in Portland, thinking I might talk to the presiding priest. I am glad I went, to give thanks, but as the service ended I understood that no one in the world was going to tell me what was right or true as far as the meaning of my dream. My body felt drained, my heart light. I attended daily Mass the next morning at St. Stephens. That is a hardcore group, the daily Mass folks.

The upshot is that my Patron Saints will be Joseph (husband of Mary) and Petronious. I have said my thousand prayers to God for mercy for the souls in purgatory. If I have done some good beyond fulfilling my vow, great. These were undreamt and treacherous real-world waters I was unprepared for that I got through and am glad to report. Thank goodness it is over.

Other notable"take-aways":

The RC Catechism speaks of prayers to God being directed to Angels or Saints for mediation.
Comments: Roger that. 10-4.

I am American. Petronius was Italian.
Thought: It couldn't matter less.

Saint Petronius, made a Bishop, appeared to me in the robes of a monk.
Rome: take note.

Principally, when God delivers your prayers, you should deliver on your promise to God.
cf. too many references to list here, and I wouldn't do that to you or myself even if I wanted to. I mean, you know where to go find this stuff, right?

Finally, my wife pointed out to me that I have often spoken of "rebuilding" from when I was young, since my days in New York, in C.B.G.B.'s. Rebuilding. When, in life, in poetry, in form, and now have I ever done other than rebuild.

Maybe someday, maybe soon, life mght feel new.

Ours is not a fashionable time to be Catholic, and less to announce it, but then it is never the time to be anything other than what one must be because you feel it stronger than anything, because you believe. I am what I am because I believe with love, and I state what I am and what I know being under another sort of obligation to tell the truth as I am best able. You see how lives can be made and remade, and so you speak to that purpose. What could be simpler.

Installment Radio

2011-12-26T16:18:00.000-08:00

You think it is a matter of money or time or energy. You form an idea and take it for a walk, but really you are shopping. You go shopping and make a couple calls on your cell phone. Nothing has changed at the stores and, by the time you get home - nothing has changed there either.

I have been thinking about what you said or wrote. Even so - and it may be right - I am all caught up here with this project. It is not a project such as has a beginning and an end. It is not a work or even a series of works that cue off one another. I may write a title, or I may forget my place and have to start over. I cannot be confident of a final report.

The central problem here is the predominance of centrality. So what I want you to do is stand up and go straight out that door and keep walking until you find you can't go another step. This will be your life's destination, so be careful to give it a name you can remember.

No doubt, I have been given a name or names. But then I can't find in myself to ask what those names might be or to make guesses. I have already left the spot where I introduced and abandoned this point, which inevitably continues a line of thought I have never bothered to describe.

Even if I say "ritual" or when I use that word - "ritual" - I feel like I have sat down somewhere, my hands in my lap, while the world continues to operate more or less as is, exchanging handshakes and meaningful glances and generally passing me by.

Someone says, "it is time." This is a signal. People who signal are a burden to those who are willing to accept signals. All signals are equal in the eyes of those who are accustomed to work. I manage resources, energy, and anxiety. I am open to grace.

I look at decisions like air or water, in the same manner. My eyes are directed at a portion or aspect of the sky; now at an area, a point of a stream, and I can sit here forever, but I will never have anything more to say than that which I am capable of relating now.

What I describe is knowledge of the sort that is constituted of description and admits of a person's ability to put thoughts and feelings into words; providing this restriction, that the very desire to speak colors and indeed helps to form the ideas themselves - in the first and final draft, or as we cry out our slogans or seek understanding or relief.

What is parallel to another thing is not necessarily its equal; so you can see where all the questioning comes from.

Form is to thought as seasons are to memory.

Days after Evenings still

2011-11-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

It is in the nature of content to inspire confusing messages. This is how content protects itself from the casual eyes of strangers, with a web of divergent, confused, over-lapping messages, which only the pure of heart have the courage to endure.

It is as simple to understand, that nature begets a creature of words which that creature employs in relating to others of its kind the content and purpose of nature. Nature has one more surprise. This is, that the creatures believe in an omnipotent god or gods who serve as nature's master. Nature disappears in the woolen knitting ball of the language matrix and being fronted by a bearded mouthpiece.

Nature and content are clearly a problem for different but closely related reasons.

I choose to believe in God as God, not as nature's proxy or its master, though I can consider God as content. For instance, I am concerned with myself, and I do what I can, given the circumstances, but imagine (I ask myself) how many souls God has seen in like circumstances, how many souls She has seen hop out of the dugout of the empyrean womb to take their place at the dish of Jerusalem and take their swings? And yet, His eye is fresh to the promise of each soul. She knows the averages and at the same time is blind to mere numbers. That is the promise of my religion, as I understand it, and it is not a bad promise, as promises go.

The question that arises is whether it is in the nature of God to produce confusing messages. The answer I believe is that God is not merely content, or locatable as content and subject to the approximations or conditions of content. Neither is God a problem. To say She is would be to make of problems a God - a diaphanous, ill-veined, diabolical construction.

Content that is presumed to displace God marks a colonization of the soul. I take this choice to be a much greater problem than even if a stranger were to occupy your house against your choice.

Material derives from content and its relation to Nature in the form of explicit, implicit, and latent messages. There is a sameness to relations in as much as the ethical is full of meaning, brimming with meaning. A message is an avenue of meaning; all such messages function on an alterior plane, where definitions are bought by comparison, endorsement, or exclusion. The universality of the ethical is in this sameness, the quotidian wash of care and concern, anger and forgiveness. No one thought can suffice where the presumptions are natural, the goal material. Not merely the medium, but the messaging is the message.

There are signs and displays. Encampments, bake sales. A referendum follows a day of longing hinged on a proposal of music tonight. And tomorrow; tomorrow we visit the country.

Petal Management

2011-10-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

I am thinking of what I can do which might help me to focus, but that sort of thinking rarely grants me focus. That sort of thinking is a kind of signal which I may or may not heed, so I write here hoping this activity will bring me to the heeding point in a style of recognition and understanding. Bear with me.

Wanting to live for and in the future - yet I have no exact idea what that means. Perhaps I am repeating myself in my moods. That would explain the semblance of a page, a blank page, day after day. I think this, and feel a spark of recognition and understanding. But that is all. I do not experience decision-making. I am not often excited by decisions. They seem all alike, being the occasions of a person's literal being making notes upon a will. I am not arguing for non-action though. I am simply not arguing.

This goes on for awhile until I move as if motivated by a basic need to move - uncontrollably, I tell myself. And I write. I do not trust it. I do not trust a person who cannot live as they should live when the means are in their reach. Here, weekend after weekend, I encounter the blank page and wallow and retire and sleep. Being merely capable is not enough for me to work. I must be over-capable. So charged with rest that I cannot stay in bed.

I think of distractions. One change I made recently was to pare down the intensity and frequency of my workouts during the week, which were at times exhausting me so that I would need two days to recover. Then, there are politics and social-networking - which are largely one and the same thing. I think I will do this week what I did two weeks ago with my workouts, which is to promise myself to cut back.

This is beginning to create a kind of sense. Here I sit, writing. I may write a poem. I then will turn the computer off, or at rate avoid the news, the politics, and the networking for the entire remainder of the day. Tomorrow morning I go to the computer last having written on it. What will be my expectations? They may first be to write. That after all is what I am missing. The expectation, the lead into the act. I have acquired a habit of responding, relaying, playing to a subject. That is politics, not poetry as I understand poetry or must, being the manner in which I write it.

Occulence

2011-10-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

Water and earth do not lie, but you will tell me what is right and wrong about people we have never met. You can never know why a thought appears, but I will fall apart without a kind word or look at least every now and then. You are being reasonable, but I am thinking about what I need to get to a better place. I look over the landscape and say, I need to slow down. I am not a young man any more. I cannot rebound from error and I cannot afford mistakes. You will not hear this from me because one mistake would be if I distracted you from your purpose.

I assume you have purpose. The media - which is a word that is fluid with dictionary meaning - tells me what you do. Expert commentators step in and out like water birds too full to fish and too fragile to remain on land.

I know how things are done, which is merely saying I do, without knowing one way or another, but not feeling like I am lying either. I am not feeling like I am lying, but I know that depends on me, not you or some outside source for truth measurement. I think the same is true for you, but I can never be certain. Some avenues go further than others, but none are utter or complete. Certanly, I have never come close to circling back to myself, to seeing myself from a distance so as to be able to form an opinion that I could return to myself for some purpose. I do not know what it would be.

A Glancing Guide to Forms

2011-09-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

This is how you began -

As a child the world appeared sometimes this -

Or, this -

In time, you might possess one of these -

You will certainly earn one of these -

Desire

2011-09-19T05:49:00.000-07:00

All desires are ships, and many desires are sailing ships. I have a bird's eye view of the deck, tending slighty astern. The ropes and tackle and on-board equipment are placed neatly. There is evidence of use and travel, but no obvious signs of wear. The deck itself is polished, the wood worn but straight, for all desires are true. There is no sign of life, though the evidence of life is everywhere. We cannot see below deck. My eye encompasses only ten yards or so of the surrounding water. Calm seas, I think, or that is my impression.

Valorette

2011-09-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Time is not what it was. We hardly see each other anymore. A wave of the hand, a vague smile suffices where once we shook hands or even embraced like long-lost friends.

Maybe it is the town that has changed. I look for and see white picket fences, boys riding bikes, people of all ages walking alone or as couples, sometimes leading or trailing a dog. But perhaps the town has changed somehow, in ways I cannot see. Perhaps the people have changed.

If I asked, would people tell me how they have changed? Is there a story to change or a science? Is anyone, meaning everyone, competent to tell their own story? I thought that took a certain talent and practice.

No matter. At the end of the day I am the one who has lost touch with time. And I am unconcerned, not worried at all, not about time, not one bit.

Elephant

2011-08-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

It makes perfect sense in retrospect that when I finally got going on the "epic" poem it would look nothing like what I first intended. The rhythms are prosy, the lines long, the action shifts quickly, fancifully. What themes are recurring notes there are occur like fruit or nuts hanging from a tree.

I can see the poem lampooning and entertaining, I hope, and therefore being Byron's-Don-Juan-inspired, I suppose. So, the form is global while the execution is local, and there it is, and that is good for me and others I hope and makes me glad. Any one poem is a writing in its time. The author merely launches it in among all the other craft, being responsible for the construction but not the voyage. Readers now are so very intent on purpose and so easily hooked by meaning - it is a perfect time to write long and easily about anything, anything at all, and to catch the reader at his or her interpretive expectations and mistakes - and to release them of course, somewhat the wiser, one hopes.

Cantos or strophes will be 50 lines as I intended originally. I was able to write 46 lines of the first one and do a drawing over a two-hour period at the Clinton Street bar last night, hip-hop blaring through the room. It was a perfectly barsy, lovely setting to write. I don't pretend to understand why such venues work for me, but I know that I could never have started this poem sitting at home.

I can't try to write a poem without thinking about writing a poem, which means writing what I know to be a poem, being what I or others have written. In this instance, I was driven by several x-treme failed attempts to dislocate myself and simply GO - and it worked, producing what I need and have not noticed elsewhere, so be it. I am sure too that I can keep it going from home with perhaps occasional sojourns off-site.

Other thoughts: this first epic, called "Elephant" will run ten pages in a manuscript called for now: (dot). The MS will include 10 visual/poem drawings, ten pencil drawings, and 20 individual box poems split evenly into four categories, tentatively labeled lyric, history, quotidian, and technical. I hope to finish and publish by the end of the year.

Here are the first several lines - thank you for reading.

Most of the words are clearer than they need to be,
In fact, you might be surprised. The people were in
Cars and trucks. A few rode elephants, but they had
All the gear too. Fancy blankets and pillows; these
Saddles that wobbled like heck but they didn’t fall
Over. The traffic was a mess I guess but no one was
In much of a hurry. Young girls circled me pouring,
In turn, cool water, pure milk, and sweetest nectar
From lightly polished brass pitchers. This specific
Girl was my wife, and I want everyone to understand
That particular point. Back and forth, up and down......

Words as to Departure Prompted in the Act of Completion

2011-08-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

A friend commented on a recent posting, where I praised the work of Byron and wrote about the pleasures I derive from his poems, including Don Juan - mentioning dual pleasures - and referred to the author Byron's jabs at Wordsworth and Coleridge while praising Pope at his (Byron's) own expense - my friend commented:

"Who's 'our' Pope, I wonder, to hold up our Wordsworths and Coleridges to? & who even are they?"

Context is I think an unsightly sort of word for when a friend speaks, but you will want to know that this friend writes and teaches - he has written clear, sensible, lovely poems, I know - and I believe he has fallen into a lifelong habit of both meaning and prompting, which is hard work to get into and all too easy to fall out of.

I return to myself, my thoughts as prompted.

My initial reaction is properly literal - who and who indeed? Names suggest themselves but there is no fit. Not for me. Our time (as my friend well knows - and let's say goodbye to him as all that follows is none of his fault) is not Byron's. The cultural/social/historical fabrics are not the same, they do not fit or overlap or compete as did the fabrics of 1820.

But Byron - as I stated and contend - completed Pope, as poets sometimes reach back, just a ways perhaps (sometimes only a week or so), and enliven or finish another poet's work, and to a purpose. Byron's work is a wonderful sort of testament to what was fine and rich and enduring in 18th Century English literature, which is a convenient way, and not the only one of course, to refer to what got published then, as written and edited by people now long dead. Byron's poems at their beat are clear and rich and sharp and not to be fucked with (or great, we used to say and still might, in a moment of personal weakness) - and, the individual mattered some: his (her, I will allow by long-fabled and dead proxy though Byron's opinions or personal history speaks to ulterior purposes) experience, drives, motives, & missions, self-sustaining or on behalf of what we might call an "ideal" - but ignore those quotes, please.

So I ask the literal, and can I answer it? - who is our Pope, or is there is an author whose work yet might sponsor, or does in fact sponsor work by someone who now completes that work? That is a proper sort of question, but I cannot answer it as I have only a very partial idea of what anyone besides myself has written or is doing, at all let alone in terms of poems written.

This is principally because I am not professional. I publish my own work and I blog, and I live moment by moment for this, what I do, but I neither live by my writing, or criticism, or teach, and so I am not compelled to render an opinion - which frankly I take to be a potential loss. Such pressures are perhaps a form to compel personal choice where otherwise no meaning would be rendered, no change occur. And I believe in form. And I believe that the teacher is who moves the world.

But, back to my argument.

I can pick out names. I could say for myself and for myself alone that Robert Lowell is my Pope, a personal figure, one whose work I believe I identify with with perfect intensity; and I might say - I might, I say, I might say R. Lowell had it right. Some other popular poet - let's pick Ashbery, Ponge, Cage, Bernstein, whomever - is confused and confusing, mimicking Byron's charge against Wordsworth.

This would be a purely lyric invention though, available only through a lyric consideration or belief in self, which I believe I have lost sight of, or at least so I tell myself I believe. Such a reading or conveyance would be compact, easily reproduced. And all wrong. I respect and love so many, so very different poems written by such diverse poets - professional and non (so very many different sects and individuals it is not practicable to render an accounting). I enjoy and respect and see the worth of almost anything you put in front of me, PROVIDED that it is well done, or effective in purport, which means very different things for different sorts of work.

Right there is my point, made a point, alluded to vaguely before in this essay. Our world is more complex, more various - it is more peopled - than Byron's was. Speaking personally, I don't know that I can even simply react anymore and render that reaction as a principal, not finally, not with finality; or, I don't trust any one act upon mere impulse or impression; rather, instead, I trust that I, that we act.

I am one amongst we, an I in we, and I say - we act on what we believe, on what we see and what we can make of it; we, (and therefore I) act - we, poets, writers, artists, people - individually and in community (perfectly or variously defined) - we, I, may react in effect, but we act in purpose and in fact, denoting the fact of the here and the now.

I believe strongly that as the world tends it will continue to tend. We will act with purpose. Our impulses and reactions will more and more be identified as a sort of ephemera, a hermeneutic appendage. Not useless at all, no, but a step in the chain of process.

We will soon, if not now, find ourselves in constant contact.

More Looking, Less Deciding

2011-07-30T08:38:00.000-07:00

This idea of an epic/consecutive epics has taken hold. Epic with a small or super-condensed "E" - ten cantos each a page of fifty lines in decasyllabic block form; hoping for ten over ten years.

In my free moments I think about possible themes. Milton spun quite a bit of good from a few lines in the Bible; perhaps I could do the same? Different lines, perhaps Moses dying in sight of Canaan, or something from Matthew.

Or biography. Who are my heroes? Kierkegaard? Robert Lowell? Fausto Coppi?

Or personal biography; or a bit of local history; mathematics and science. Science fiction: satire?

Something recounting an episode from Thoreau's life, perhaps. Or, mixing two or more themes together. And I think about starting somehow and seeing what comes of it.

I have a page running where I have set down some lines:

Coincidence and chemicals and noise

The small things we put aside and forget
and will not throw away....

I woke on a ship. We were out at sea,

A face can be recovered in a dream,

There’s some relief in falling from a tree

Not everyone can be saved, bodies pushed beneath the waves,

Whenever someone says I may, I can

Strapped-down inveterate obliging cinnamon
tied-at-the-waist - incendiary troglodytes

Who lives long enough to see how it ends?
Will I complete a circle, or will trials,
delays, make of my life a half-tale - ...

Am I secure, annoyed, or without sin?
Death, regurgitation, and little men.

I am considering a form other than decasyllables. Mixed lines, or fourteeners (as Chapman), or who knows. I have ordered a recent book edited by Strand that covers varieties of form in contemporary poetry, or examples of older forms used recently, I guess. There may be something in there to push me in one direction or another.

I am enjoying the process, the anxiety, the limbo. I like form for being, for me, both an object or obstacle and a means or prompt. Writing in form states an intent and humility, such as I understand, that is clear from the outset and remains in place for a reader's immediate comprehension. I have written something (says form) in the shape of what others have done wonderfully. I have added some personal twists. I hope I do not embarrass myself here, says form, but clearly I have opened myself up to criticism. Whatever I am at doing, I am willing and even happy to fail, if only because my models are so very alive, so very great.

At any rate, I find it comfortable, this process. I am still reading excerpts from Byron's Don Juan (Norton Critical Edition) but may move on soon to Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest, a so-called "steam punk" novel. This project has helped my with a couple ongoing poems which I may publish on FB in my usual manner or seek to place elsewhere.

More looking, less deciding, more living.

Writing the Idea of a Writing Idea

2011-07-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

I feel recalled to the pleasure of a challenge, undertaken for its own sake, which is all I have been able to understand of writing poetry. And now I have an idea of a project where I can both dwell and reveal more than I know at any given point.

An epic in form of ten cantos, one page per canto, 50 lines per page, box form, all lines in all cantos the same width. Lines will point toward the decasyllabic.

A ten-page epic of 500 lines total. Brief, yes, but essential. Not really epic, is it? Mind your own forms and process, Mac. I will hope at the outset for ten epic poems for a total of 100 pages in identical form, and what will be largely interchangeable I hope. Let's say, one epic per year for ten years or so to supplement other projects, running underground or above-board as the mood takes me.

Themes are open, the range as broad as possible. Definition and redefinition and placement or form. Questing and placement or form. Journal entries and note-taking as with all the above. And love; and faith and love. Science and the cinema and placement. Truth and forgetfulness and form. Technique and pasturage and placement and form. Noise and God and noise and form. Mystery and laundry and clarity and shame.

I will make for myself the opportunity to employ ships, and dragons, and gods, and coffee, and hardwood floors, and the open highway, but I can promise nothing. I am happy to say, I promise nothing at all.

Words including the word "Byron"

2011-07-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

Boarding the bus after work - ; I think that's right. One boards a bus. I recognized looking forward to reading more of Byron's Don Juan - and, Why?

The pleasure of reading Byron's Don Juan is at least two-fold. Fold number 1 is the story, or what happens next. Fold No. II is in Byron's digressions and ongoing moments where he reveals the tastes, impressions, and biases of the author composing Don Juan. There is no telling when these digressions will occur or where they will take us. The liner notes are scarcely more informative than the bald text of Byron's sarcasms toward Wordsworth, or the former Lady Byron, or a tutor he fell out with as a boy, or English politics, and on and on.

I say at least two-fold as perhaps there is more going on here, which is Byron revealing what the Byron wants to read Byron revealing, or la di da. But I doubt it. Byron was self-admittedly a fluid, prolific writer. It shows, in near identical rhymes in proximate stanzas, in close then distant adherence to the form (ottava rima). The wit is at turns linear - getting off a good crack - or sublime (a rhyme that lights the page). Whatever third or more aspect of the text there might be would result more as an accident of the reader than an owing to an effort by the author. And so. We. Move on.

You can be a different writer than Byron, but I don't think you could make better choices being the writer Byron was. It took me until now to really get around to him, and what a tremendous surprise it has been. Some of my favorite authors are 18th Century English - Swift and Richardson foremost - and here, here as I see it is the last of the great 18th Century writers, cast all over with Romantic concerns, especially those of the political variety. I don't know another English writer that posits George Washington in such a glowing aspect. But then Byron was a perfect reader for his own interests (which I think every good poet is once you scratch the surface, or not even). For instance, he put Moore, Campbell and Crabbe ahead of Wordsworth and Coleridge; was sure that "posterity" would decide likewise.

Well, who cares, is the point. He had the guts to read his own poems and those of his friends side by side with Pope's and say, Pope had it right.

Do we do something like?

If you are interested, or even if you aren't - I am reading a Norton Critical Edition. The translation from when English was King is quite fair, I think.

World Update

2011-07-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading and enjoying a collection of Byron's poetry. I could stop right there.

People, People Like You, People Ask.

2011-06-08T19:47:00.001-07:00

People ask me, how is it that you have lost so few socks? First, some facts. I have lost 2 maybe 3 socks over the last 20 years. And 2 of those were those super thin cycling socks, which could have gotten caught up in another piece of clothing in the dryer and maybe got tucked away somewhere.

This is how I don't lose socks.

You lose socks at those times/moments or fantasy junctures when the socks are vulnerable to being lost. I discovered that those times are recognizable if you are sensitive to all times at all times. This being a discussion of sock-weakness time, I confine myself to that discussion, which is this essay.

I at some point recognized and still do that I knew when the socks were vulnerable to being lost. See if you recognize these situations. You are moving too fast, shoving laundry here and there so as to get to something you imagine is more pressing. You are tired, and it shows in how you lump about holding armfuls of ill-managed laundry....

I want to be a man about this and tell it "like it is" so here goes. You have attended to the laundry - up to a point - then the whole thing goes to Hell in a hand basket because you throw the dried laundry into a hand basket or go-kart without first folding it, and matching up socks, and pairing them appropriately as in the age-old parallel cuff inversion formula.

Note that a formula is a form for relating formation and form. Back now.

You choose where you fail. It is not my job to tell you your business. I do know this. I know that for men socks are one of the few accoutrements we can enjoy and get away with - argyles, bright colors: all the joy and chic of the donnable is oftentimes rendered alive only in socks. To lose a sock of a set one loves can be painful. It can be defeating and deflating. Deflating, says I. Opting for a style or non-style of sock all of a type is worse than murder, it is a ruining of nature.

And so I know one other thing. If you manage your laundry properly you will not lose socks unless you are a cyclist or a ballerina, I suppose. And even if you should lose one or two from now until you die, you will chalk up those losses to experience, as tokens forfeited to the notion of completeness that awaits in another, better life. A life, to be sure, where a sock is just a sock.

Waver Favors

2011-06-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

It is a function of the occasion to forget itself, to make itself lost in the surrounding circumstances. Occasion occasion occasion.

I am unexpectedly alive, querulous, ready to write to a purpose. I do not have one yet but I will. I will have to arrange or conceive some idea, or target. I think this is typical: finishing an MS, publishing it, a couple weeks of weak writing, blowing out the pipes, then nothing, then this.

I never have an idea anymore unless compelled by the occasion of experiencing that selfsame nothing. I believe this is a function of age or efficiency. I ride one horse to a stop, walk around the corral a bit, select a fresh mount (or it selects me) and off I go.

I am reminded of a comic strip, where a wife says to her husband, dressed to go for a bike ride, "Cycling season's over, where are you going?" "Why, to train for next season, of course."

Lift a glass to our many seasons.

Representative Books

2011-05-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

I know quite a lot about publishing, at least from what I read in books. That may be a biased source though, and so I look elsewhere, particularly to my own experience.

I am published and a publisher; and in the field of book publishing my credentials suggest I am impervious to bias, for I am exactly equally published as publishing. In all, I am somewhat more published, having dotted the literary magazines here and there until deciding I did not care to do that any more.

I do not care for publishing, but I must publish. In the same way, I do not care for gardening, yet I must make love to my wife. Can I be any clearer?

Publishing is an act whereby an author consigns his or her work to the public, however that term is defined. The public may be general, or subscription-based. It may be the monks sharing the abbey where you scratch away at your parchment. It may be this, or it may be that. It may change, over time, as the illuminated manuscripts on museum display testify.

No matter. The author publishes and so is rid of the thing being published. The effect is immediate and indelible. One is free, free to...well, write some more. But free at least of one construction and open to another. That is a wonderful feeling, and it is a freedom, a release, make no mistake.

But with freedom comes responsibility. Or does it. No, not in my case. I have no book tour obligations to meet. I have no reviewers to thank. No sales figure I might hope to reach to ensure that the next book can be published. I am not made naked, for I have spoken only to a handful of people about the poems or the book that was made out of them. As to editors or readers, I have my friends on Facebook, where I will occasionally post poems - and my wife, Endi, who is the only person I let read my manuscripts. But then she is the only person I trust to read my manuscripts as a reader, not a writer. That is, she can put her writerly self aside long enough to read and tell me a couple useful things. I almost always implement her advice (then pull back a bit) and the manuscript clicks into place.

So, I have a manuscript and must publish it. That takes about five days. I obtain an ISBN number, I draw the cover; I format the manuscript, fixing all the bugs that occur in that process, and I publish. I obtain a proof copy and hit the button to distribute worldwide.

My only obligation is to continue to write.

Is there regret? yes, there is regret, for I am never more alone than when I let go of something that has been constantly on my mind. Do I ever wish I published by more traditional channels?

Let me put it this way. There is not one word out of place in my 16 books, not one line I would change, not one drawing I would substitute. In the process of writing these books, of rewriting, of tossing out and putting in, always polishing until I was absolutely sure - in this process, I have established a greater good for myself than could ever be realized by merely publishing one book, in whatever manner, to whatever sort of acclaim. I feel that I have been true to my work and to myself. At the age of 52 I write to the edge of my abilities - sometimes beyond - and I have no regrets. I have no reputation to protect, no persons I rely on whose favor influences what words or images I will put to paper today.

I do believe that publishing the way I do annoys some of my friends, or concerns them, in that I have chosen to be "unpublished" in a conventional sense. In short, they disagree. The solution is a practical one for me though, and I ask that it be seen in that light. Certainly, it is no critique of other means. I celebrate my friends' successes on and off the publishing field.

There is so much that concerns each other - apart from being read, I mean.

Operating Book Talk

2011-05-04T17:56:00.000-07:00

Are morals cause or syntax? Do we dress in our morals or are we driven by them?

On another subject, this book (First Days Last) is fulfilling the promise of a bear. I have poems, drawings, and visual poems. I never imagined that the finished manuscript would make sense in a way that makes sense, but I am wondering now how it will make sense in a way that does not make sense. Or, it is bound to do both - sensibly, I hope. So I have arranged the elements in accordance with the abc/cab/bca scheme I outlined a while back, and now have printed out the poems themselves. I will arrange those by themselves then insert them back into the manuscript in that order to see what the whole effect is like.

With respect to morals, I think we do both. I will be very relieved when I have published this book.

Get a job, Lebowski!

2011-04-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I posted a story to the effect that Walt Whitman was a routinely effective and contented office worker. This was news, for we are accustomed to believing strongly before the fact that one cannot be a poet and work in an office. We believe this, because biographers and critics - who as a rule work in Academia - discount normalcy in favor of what sticks out. This is right and proper, for biographers and critics want their subjects and therefore themselves to be noticed, and being not-normal is a routine way of being noticed - being romantic, let's say. Let's put that word to it. Romantic.

Walt Whitman, the carefree wastrel, who lounges to work, labors idly, then disappears as in a cloud of whimsy. This is more or less how Whitman's working life has been characterized. This, or, that he tended to the wounded during the Civil War. The artist a tending angel. Really, I never knew he had had an office job. He, and others. Like Charles Olsen, who served in several bureaucratic functions, I believe.

I would like writing programs to post on their university walls picture diagrams of famous and not-so famous poets, men and women, and what they did or do for a living. I would like 23 year-old MFA students to consider the challenge of writing and being a baker, let's say, and adding their name to the list. In short, I would like everyone all at once to grow up, get a clue, and not worry about what they do for a living, as long as it gets them enough money to live satisfactorily, or so that they have sufficient time and energy and freedom of thought to write as well as they would hope to.

Because that's all a job is. There is no ideal, and certainly no right and wrong on the subject of getting a living. Walt apparently thought highly of some of the bureaucrats he worked with. And why not. Why not simply do what you do well and respect others who do the same.

in scale

2011-03-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

All day long the sea went back and forth, back and forth. At night the moon was as if suddenly clear of obstructions and showed huge and plain. There was no talking to the moon, and so we kept our heads down and argued among ourselves.

A kind of camp was established. Its fire burned all night, various hands tossing in pieces of driftwood, paper, cardboard packaging - whatever those hands found for the purpose. Some of us stayed by the fire, lounging, one's back against a log, another hunched over, face peering into the fire. His hands move busily but without any particular end. Nervous hands.

I got up and walked out toward the waves. I heard them before I saw them, trim little ridges of foam obliterating over the barren sands. Then I reached out and felt your fingertips touch mine, as if you had read my mind. I can't say I was pleased. I am impossible to know, I am sure. I am unlovely, untrue, and will live out an undiscovered life.

But still you find me.

Walden/Concord

2011-03-06T20:30:00.000-08:00

I dreamed a dream where I could write poems without it taking so much out of me, but it was just a dream. Likewise, I am drawn to the experience of where the doing and knowledge of doing come together. The location of this experience or understanding is at the apex of a slender curve. I must be rested and more or less confident in my life to find this place, which is after all interior. I cannot be unique, and so this place is interior to us all, though I must suppose it goes by different names. I am uncertain of what is interesting, however intriguing, and so continue on toward what I hope will be true, even as I fall, again and again, out from my understanding. I pull my life about me, I settle my affairs - it may take hours, days, weeks or months - and set out again. I write in form in blank recognition that I am a form of a man writing in the form of poetry. In the act of writing in form - in the act - I feel like I am in physical correspondence with the location of which I speak, where the doing and the knowing are nearly as one.

Rest@Play

2011-03-04T20:31:00.000-08:00

Several years ago I wrote a poem called Fifteen Tercets, where I applied the structure of Terza Rima (abc/cab/bca) to the structure of the strophes, where a = one line; b = 3; c = 2, like this:

Our particularity

This capacity for
dead landscape...
name living lands

a car door slam a
race up the steps

Gray lockers flex
with a generation

quick tumble chew

On the formica my
hand exposed Noon
destroying detail

Just like a clock
to talk a lot but
keeping to itself

Old Mr Henderson,
young mrhenderson

chewing on chalk.

My idea is to create a book structured in this fashion, juxtaposing the block form Fictions I have been writing (in the "B" spot), Poem Drawings (in the "C" spot), and black-and-white drawings in the "A" spot. So. The book would start with 1 drawing, then 2 poem drawings, then 3 Fictions/break/3 Fictions 1 drawing, 2 poem drawings/break - etc. Of course three rounds (a Tercet) complete a cycle, adding up to 18 entries (18 pages, as all this material is one/page). I figure four tercets to give the thing corners and balance, or 72 pages.

I am happy I think though tired from my job and hope this works. I get to choose what goes where, of course. But I have to say I have not been looking forward to trotting out yet another collection of poems. This book will have shape upon shape upon varying shapes. And the best part is I have all the Fictions written (I will need 36 and have 43 keepers so far). I need create 22 more poem drawings - which could be a problem, granted (I have 2 and am not convinced of the form) - and 12 drawings - which I can do in two days. Of course I can switch drawings for poem drawings if things get dire.

I Will Get Around To You Eventually

2011-03-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

I want to write more poems so that I can publish more books. I want to publish more books because it allows me to think about and write more poems. Sooner or later I will die and who knows what that will lead to.

Speaking of poems, I have 43 drafted Fictions but have slowed down to where I wonder why I have slowed down. Ideas are occurring to me - never a good indicator - ideas of variations and different forms to interpose with the Fictions. Ideas though are the lazy man's way out. Anyone can come up with an idea. It's takes something special to do the same thing over and over again. Yessir!

That's out of the way. The process indicates a slowing then visualizing a form of the completed work. It may be some of this or some of that. I will bet you a dollar that I end up with the book I first intended, being 87 Fictions. I would have to write I think about 50 to 60 more to end up there though. Factor in that I can't live in this project more than another six months. Tops. I live in a point/counter-point universe, and too much of even a good thing can be bothersome.

That brings me to you.

You Said it Sunday

2011-02-27T09:57:00.000-08:00

Reading some Beckett - More Pricks than Kicks - first thinking that considering all the people who ooo and ahh over Joyce, I trust Beckett got it, because I sure never have. Second wondering at B's language - determined, furious, "standing out."

Well then it comes to me that like Joyce his language is implicit with all the anger you would expect of an Irishman writing in the language of English. Beckett is to Dickens what Ice Cube is to Updike if you like it that way. This is not a thought so much as light dawning as to the nature of a family quarrel. The features of the living room, the artifacts, stand out. Thinking of Joyce like an Englishman thinks and you are lost even as you are bound to believe yourself. This does not mean I now get Joyce, but I better get not getting him, and what's more I respect him the more for it.

What is the quarrel. For my part, I see an Irishman as one who steps into a fight and pulls it up over his head and would sooner commend his soul to God than stop short of an end to it, whereas an English thinker can't stop talking about his options. Speaking of religion is to step into it. Beckett captures the distinction perfectly when a character, a Jesuit, finishing his debate with an atheist states "The best reason that can be given for believing is that it is more amusing. Disbelief is a bore. We do not count our change. We simply cannot bear to be bored."

I cannot bear to be bored, but what is my quarrel? Categories are elusive. Analogically, cycling suggests winners and losers. But for the cyclists there are racers and non-racers. A good racer helps "make the race." The more who race, the better the race, the more relevant the outcome. I do not know how not to race. I pull the race up over my head. I know the pleasure of winning and I know the pleasure of going to the front when the boys are chatting and picking up the pace so that the talk stops.

Even so, faculties diminish but not our need for love. To succeed in the game I play you must above all things endure. The final exhibit is one's naked will, unharnessed to accomplishment, untasked with admirers, unadorned, feckless, free. "The Spirit of the People," in this case is more or less a coincidence of actions ascribable to a person who wants what no one can give him and is determined to keep it so. This and bodily health buys me silence in which to enjoy a clear conscience, for I can do nothing and it will be the same to almost everyone if I were to write forever.

Which leads me to wonder, do I do too much? I think so. Recent experience has taught me to consolidate, to pull in the satellites, to retract and reside. My door is open, wide open to family, friends, wayfarers, but I will not venture outside. This is a way of seeing who you are as you prepare to do what you do. I will not expect myself to respond unless asked to. This seals a few ongoing leaks that I cannot support any longer. The quarrel has reached a stage of subtle influencings. I cannot retreat and I cannot remain in place or be bored.

The process is to work when you work and to philosophize when you do not, for that is a taking away of what hampers your work.

A hero cast the pitchfork, but who and what sharpened its prongs?

Stock Car Racing

2011-02-20T18:43:00.000-08:00

The realm of distinctions is not susceptible to imagination. Imagination does however attend distinctions, as like a musician hired to practice at a trade fair.

In our perceptions we are susceptible to the Thing and its Attendants. Imagination does not assist in reduction.

Poetry, if it is good, honest work, can attend or it can reduce. It does not produce.

My poetry is a poetry of reduction. I believe one starts with what is at one's fingertips then makes choices and is chosen, resulting then in a reduction, or poem. Imagination is not a means. It is the sound, sight, or sense created by means in friction.

Philosophy is the practice of working to producing an agreeable result from means in friction.

The imagination has no place in philosophy, and no place without it. Whereas poetry in form is the registered fact that one is the hunter, not the hunted.

Aphorisms are as funny as one is willing to enjoy keeping one's mouth shut.

If I wanted to be famous, nothing would be different from now, as I would very much like to be famous. But more than that, always more, I wish to be great.

May the means and their frictions grant you the pleasures that attend an imaginary end.

I know why I will never be known. Because I am not known now. Fifty-two year old people do not get known ever, not unless they appear, as if suddenly, smiling for the simple fact of being recognized.

I am entitled to recognize myself. All the other boys have left the room.

Perhaps you think I am content. Ha. I am not content. I am at mid-wrestle always always always. But, I hate the sound of me saying something of no use to anyone but myself. Curiously, my comments on others are more about myself than those regarding myself, my practice. There is no paradox. Speaking of myself I form a secondary content, which is at some lengths more interesting than the tertiary content of criticism and commentary.

Oh well then, fine, I want to unstick myself as I am too constantly stuck, wondering how to get back to fluidity.

I love blogging, where there is every opportunity to do nothing at all.

I am in a peculiar place and have been for weeks, as if caught just inches or minutes from an understanding that would free me, that would grant me a clear, abiding, conscionable self-awareness. Always I am just this close. I do not mean to eliminate self-doubt - or do I? How much can I know writing about what I can understand?

It occurs to me that crossing into self-understanding of the sort I wrestle toward would be an insanity. True or false, determined and determining, I wander, I dare, I tempt, and yet always, always I wake in my own skin.

It also occurs to me that a window opens then shuts. I will never put myself into words I understand.

The realm of distinctions is only seemingly available to the imagination.

In our perceptions we seduced by wakefulness and cause. Imagination does not permit exclusion.

Poetry, when we work at it, trails at a distance the thing it must have for its master. Or perhaps I am in front of myself.

I have seen too much at arm's length to trust my mind by itself.

Daffy Duck spells Superman

2011-02-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

So I go on this business trip. I guess it's not really a business trip because I am a paralegal at a law office. I flew to Seattle, stayed overnight, was driven out to Woodinville, WA - which is like the wine capital of soggy Christendom - and presented on trademarks for wineries. It was all I could do to pull my body up to behind the lectern and deliver. Then, being done, one simply reverses. To Seattle, back home. I hate it.

I like my job, but I hate travel unless I can believe in its utter necessity. I traveled to San Francisco to see a close friend in November 2010. That was a necessity. It was something I owed myself and that friend. The entire journey was fraught with the sort of meaningfulness you naturally associate with terms of belief and need. But this, this business trip. I did no service for anyone that they could not do for themselves.

The moral, the tale's end, is in common with that of any recent misadventure. I simply will not do it again. I have presented at this seminar two years now. Enough is enough. Chuck one of the attorneys out there. They seem to have some inexhaustible interior capacity to perform on cue that I sadly am lacking.

Speaking of which, I can say that this among other recent experiences has confirmed my aversion to reading in public. I hate it, and I don't understand it. Why in heaven's name am I reading to full-grown, literate adults? Certainly, not for the poetry. You can read the poetry yourselves. Should I distrust you to ascertain certain subtle yet critical nuances? Does my reading help you to "get it"? I doubt it, and who cares if it does. That's your business, not mine. Again, there are people who incline toward delivering messages - lawyers, ministers, most poets it seems. Find someone else to do this sort of rude, campfire work. I will not be missed.

There is the contention of community, that readings build community. That would be true if people knew how to read aloud, if the poetry were all profound, and if there was no such thing as books. As it is, readings present an illusion of community as demonstrated by the fact of the reading. Poetry readings are a tautological tableau.

What is community? Well, there are two communities. There is you and your friends and professional contacts. That's one. The other is the "community" critics or historians perceive as they look over at or back on you and your friends and others and form ideas of who and what was happening and give those thoughts labels and names and such. I think poets want to be perceived as important and therefore famous - or is it the reverse... - so perhaps they feel that if they demonstrate their connections - let's say, through readings - they are in effect telegraphing a name, a happening, an "ism" far into the future (or New York), a pattern of light that will fall on wide-open, impressionable history-writing eyes.

It's not so different with business trips and such. I return to the office to questions of How did it Go. It went Well. Met some Clients. Got a Little Work out of It. I have telegraphed and received confirmation. My receptor may not be a 25th Century Stanley Fish, but can I honestly pretend to control the difference, and am I so sure it matters who or when?

Mind at Work

2011-01-15T09:07:00.000-08:00

I have been making an effort to catch my mind at its work. This morning I opened up two mailings from a credit card company. One, an offer including checks which would draw against my credit line, the other a monthly bill. I was keen to perceive the exact point when my mind would know what to do with this correspondence, and the mechanisms by which it knew - when suddenly it knew, and I too was sure it knew, and I had learned nothing.

This is what always happens.

Is it boredom or inspiration that compels me to understand the workings of my mind? It is in part a defensive labor. I confess that my mind has gotten me into the kinds of trouble that a person eventually tires of and decides he will quit. One makes these decisions independent of what one's mind is capable of deciding on one's behalf, all of which sounds to me like a plot engine for Hogan's Heroes, for reasons that elude me and which I will allow to scamper away for now.

Songs run through my mind. Songs I hear in spin class or remember from other contexts. Songs I like or which amuse me for whatever reason ("wooden ships - on the wa-ter ver-y freeee."), and perhaps music is the very thing to convey the impression that the mind, even in monitoring or betraying itself, is of itself and unified in itself. Though clearly this is not the case.

Form in poetry seems to me a similar fiction as is music in one's mind. The illusion of unity. The Santa Claus we cannot afford to disbelieve, not completely, lest we disavow "ourselves." Of course, the notion of oneself is a kind of illusion, an affect. A effective, necessary pretense. How else to take the stage and speak one's part?

What I am is what I say I shall will and do, more or less, for better or worse. But I fail. I learn, dragging my mind and body through and out the other side. I sleep and dream and try again tomorrow. I cannot imagine what I am in being before I will myself to being, or except in how I represent my being. So, I open bills and letters and decide a course of action, and any attempt to understand what I am doing is bound to the tangle of reductive factors and contingencies. I know no more of myself than in seeing what I do.

All this plays to poetry writing. I do not write when I sit and watch myself to write. Only when I willingly or am capable of willingly assuming the mantle of a Self do I write. At other times, I look at my work and wonder, How did I do this? The answer of course is that my Self did it. Talk to him. Or better yet, don't. Don't talk to him any more than is necessary.

Love & Form

2010-12-22T06:59:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-18T10:31:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-11T10:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Six Points of Formalism

2010-11-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

1. Formalism is the willingness or tendency to demonstrate in overt fashion an awareness and complicity with cultural restrictions or supplements (guidelines) - and the work-products and collateral merchandise resulting therefrom, the which, furthermore, can be reproduced, echoed, or parodied in compliance with said guidelines.

2. Every category is defined by what you expect of that category and by what is unexpected but complicit.

3. A component (activist), compatriot, or adherent of an idea is one who willingly or unwillingly communicates or commits transit of the tenets or effects, or indeed products and merchandise derived from that idea in an overt or implied license.

4. There is no idea old or new that has been transited or communicated that cannot be approached as a thing.

5. The mechanism of communication and transit is humanity; and the component of transit is the person; and the person is susceptible to moods.

6. Charity to the person is fealty to form.

SEE the poem!

2010-11-27T20:28:00.000-08:00

I am in a fairly healthy state of wondering about myself. Not in a self-evaluative way, but looking around for more obvious bits I've missed and can profit by or which might entertain.

One bit of obviousness is to say, I am a formalist. I don't know what I can add to that. It shows in the fact that I write in form, one form. I am a formal formalist. I am formal but not too formal, for instance, I do not wear gloves. I'm a ruddy, hale formalist. I care about all sorts of things. I am not exactly a snob. Well, yes, I am a complete snob. You wouldn't believe what comes out of my mouth. But not really. I simply will not traffic in crap. Nothing wrong with that! I am a Mets fan - name one Mets fan who is a snob; name one Yankees fan who isn't!

What is the poet who is a formalist and who blithely alienates Yankee fans? He is a self-destructive formalist. Ooo. Is he self-"deconstructive" of the form of his (un)doing? No, he is simply dwelling in a particularly unhelpful form - a hammer where a butter knife would do.

I love being a formalist, but I dislike being stupid and not doing a good job with being forthcoming about it. All I need to do is browse the Internet let's say for interesting or funny "formal" things - poetry-oriented or other - and post these and comment, etc. My not so formally inclined friends could take or leave these bits and everyone would I hope get something out of me being who or what I am beyond what has been, up until now, an incomplete effort.

That being said, everyone has been understanding and nice. I think my friends know me for what I am and accept me in the same vein in which I understand them. Things are convivial. Part of that is being of a certain age in Portland, Oregon and being very lucky in many ways. But the way poetry is, and it has no doubt changed since I began writing this piece, the best tack seems to me to demonstrate who and what you are to the best of your ability and let everyone sort it out. The demonstrations will vary according to style, mien, and age. We need not all blog, or mix, or read aloud, but there should be a way somehow to be amidst. And we can change our minds, etc.

Funny - you sit on thoughts to Blog, then you write almost nothing at all, but feel compelled to post it. There is something to this form of communication that elicits frankness and ease.

It Could be Verse

2010-11-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

The door had been sticking for months.
It looked like the strike plate was at
a weird angle and the door was hitting
it just opening and closing. All I had
to do I figured was take the plate off
and reset it a little straighter and a
little deeper. I got to work, took the
plate off, chiseled away a bit of wood
here & there, and was just about ready
to clear out the shavings and reattach
the strike plate when I heard a sound.

A subject of procedure occurs now and again. In the present case about 2 weeks of rumination led to 2 hours of writing and the finished poem. I had held off, not having a clear picture of what would happen once I had gotten down to clearing out the shavings. Leading into the writing, I figured a "thing" would happen. What a nice surprise when hearing a "sound" sufficed.

The poem-writing mind is accustomed be being given plenty of leash I suppose. This piece was challenging in that it had to handle it's poem-business and be a sufficient description of the simple act being described. Metaphors abound. Enough so, I think, that I can walk away satisfied.

These pieces are occurring in the way real poems do, for me at least. It's all very strange. I have 16 pieces so far. They are printed out and affixed to the wall over there with tape, like storyboards sketches. I glance over them looking for a hole, awaiting an idea. Another idea running concurrently in the back of my mind with the one above concerned a Chandler-like moment: a woman emerging from a bathroom, holding a gun, being described by the narrator. That one stewed for about as long ending up as:

She stepped out
of the bathroom
modeling my .45
& not much else

It took a one hour nap Saturday afternoon to bring me to change the draft "modeling a .45" to "modeling my .45." No other verb made me as happy as "modeling." I thought quite a bit about the proper caliber, too. A .38 is the typical cop or private eye caliber: too close to the source. A .44 is a Dirty Harry. The .45 is either an Army Colt, most likely, or simply an outrageous caliber. Of the available numbers, I settled on the .45.

The rhythm of this poem surprised me. I spent time recently with an old and new friend and the subject of Milton's verse came up, which reminded me of a student paper on the subject. Read aloud, there is no avoiding the close on three strong syllables. I hadn't expected or planned on that, naturally.

These pieces are printed out and stuck on the wall with the others. This last piece, in its brevity, rhythm, and in all the various intersections at which it dances, pleases me so much. But it is not an end. I look at this series from a number of perspectives.

The Legend of Zorro

2010-10-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

I am working on a series of poems I intend to label "Fictions," which representatives so far at least entail discrete non-narratively connected and yet somewhat-connected box poems such as:

The president leans across his desk.
Jim means you stay where we tell you
to stay. You go about your business,
and you do not think, talk, or dream
about your work or what I am to you.

It takes a poet in a village to know immediately that I am playing to an easy, guilty pleasure here. Any poet can write any number of incidents or beginnings, middles, and perhaps conclusions to a story or stories - but here, well, I am doing just that and other things:

It was Winter now. Snow drifted
down in wet, heavy flakes. Dark
trees slept in awkward clusters
near the road and closer to the
house. The silent house...where
a solitary light burned in case
Jennifer returned home tonight.

In short, I am not worrying, I am being. There's the road map. It's the poem; it's the form; it's the poet and the time and the penis here between us and the poet who has time. Poetry, said How else will I write about the president though, except in this manner? Jesus, is when a poet writes what they can't help but write. Forgive me Lord when I invoke Marvin Bell who said at some point "you can't write about a teacup without giving something away."

Well, it will go on and on, won't it, and eventually I will publish what it comes to, won't I. The good news - what I care about, which I share - is that I was a fucking nervous wreck last Monday the day after I had written the first three of these things (at McMenimans Backstage of the Baghdad during commercials for Sunday Night Football). I mean, it's Monday afternoon and I am going around to the attorneys I work with literally asking them if we were "missing" anything.

I'm fine now. I explained this series to my son and he gave it the thumbs up, figuratively speaking - or at least it made sense to him.

But the point here is women and girls and such - which is to say, I apologize in re the gender specificity (I quite mean that, you know) - but I intend to digress and disexemplify and say simply that my wife, Endi, who has always been marvelous, is marvelous. She has never qualified as a Muse being herself a fantastic poet - a moving target, that is, a peer - and thus non-pedastalistic - though the love of my life; but, really, I marvel. I marvel and I sigh and I long.

Your love is nothing to the silence of
love, he wished beneath his breath. He
was 40 years old and young, still. The
promised tickets had not materialized,
and now, as they were nearing the last
stop, his thoughts had become a finger
flipping through a catalogue of losing
propositions. Never mind, She said, We
are almost there. You can call father.

I write this post against standard practice, daring me to jinx myself. I have done 7 of these. I expect 120, which I would whittle down to a number like 87. I know enough. 15 books should count for something.

Tomorrow, we ask ourselves who is teaching these right-handed Dominican pitchers their follow through? Zorro?

How to Think about a Book

2010-10-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

I find I think about a good book in pretty much the same way I think about sex. There's more than meets the eyes and I would like more, please. I do not think about books that are not good, because they do not sponsor thought. They provoke a desire to find a good book.

I have just finished Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, which is a good book, because I am thinking about it, as an object or event, yes, but also I am thinking conceptually and comparatively. This sort of activity is, I should say, my fault, not the author's.

Oh where does a thing begin and where does it end.

Let me cover a few things here, or as many as the twin-sized blanket of my critical acumen is capable.

Proxy proxy proxy.

This book is stylistically clunky, and yet, it is intriguing. Published in 1955, it touches on the subjects of abortion, infidelity, marital discord, post-war Euro-longing, Intelli/Suburb image disaffection. I got through it well enough then was startled to find a conclusion where the author put forth an oblique representation of supporting characters metaphorizing the whole. How Franzen.

This book treats computers. It places in the mouth of a person intended to be a colossal bore (a General Manager of Sales) a speech in the throes of a four-martini lunch an impassioned vision of the place in business of the future for the computer.

It is a Small Melville World, after all.

There is a certain degree of sex in a house, an apartment, a car. Not a lot of detail. Most of the book is experienced in the thoughts and actions of a Frank, the confused white male emotionally detached central character. He deserves what he gets, the son-of-a-bitch - though it's a shame it costs his wife her life.

I like this book quite a lot though, being from 1955 - and the portrayal of the emotional charges underlying pretension, and those errors, and their impact on present emotion. One can do all sorts of things imaging oneself right, or damaged, or deprived. Be it 1955 or 2010, folks are happily driving themselves in a variety of attractive cultural or political vehicles to being stupid to the effect they produce on the people who matter most.

A Speech Respecting Concrete Form

2010-10-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

You and I were both quite young when on a Fall day - it was the Fall, I am quite sure - we passed through a white gate into an eternal garden. I just had time to register the strange abundance of flowers, fruits, and foliage in full bloom, when I fell asleep. I do not know for how long.

I woke to find you beside me, walking a familiar path. It was Autumn. We came to a white gate and entered. We stepped into a marvelous garden, brimming with all kinds of flowers, trees - all bearing fruit, in the height of their glory. I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion - I can't say why - and fell asleep right then and there.

After a while - I can't say how long it was - I came to. Strangely, I was in mid-step. You were beside me. I think you were saying something, but just at that moment we came to a gate and walked into an amazing garden. Even though it was Fall - school had started - I'm sure of it - there were flowers and trees and bushes and everything in a riot of abundance and display. I was amazed, in a kind of shock I suppose, and simply passed out.

Imagine my surprise when I awoke by your side - no, not in a bed, but walking along a road, drinking in the Autumn air. I don't recall thinking about anything in particular, but just then we came to a gate and without a word we went in. Was this our destination? I don't recall - but there was a garden of overwhelming beauty and richness. Flowers, trees, all in blossom or bearing fruit. I thought my mind's eye would suffocate on the richness, when I wavered, and fell into a deep sleep.

I am glad to have the opportunity to write to you about these things: experiences we have shared, occurrences held in common. I do not know how long I can stay at this desk. My eyes feel as if they are swimming - no, my mind is swimming, circulating between what I see at this place and time and what occurs to my interior self. The closer I am drawn to the world {it is no real world, is it, but an avocation...} the further I am lost to encircling or comprehending - holding - the works, travels - the intentions and delays of my interior self. I am become a kind of chaperon for what I have done with myself. School is decidedly out. And the world of forms carries scant credibility with what my mind suggests to itself for profit or pleasure.

I can explain further.

I will meet you at some common place.

Three New Arts!

2010-09-30T19:26:00.000-07:00

I was reading over a fellow bus passenger's shoulder yesterday and noticed an article entitled, "If Black English isn't English, then What is it?" So, the first New Art I would like to propose (it was the NY Times, no shit) is:

1. Black (or any other form of) English or any other Language, Ever

When God made Christmas trees and us to adore them She/He/Nature/It/That entitled within us a knowledge of the past and future, by which we became alerted to the need to communicate what was/will be bad and what was/ought to be Good. What we call "language" is really simply a means of communication, and people(s) do it differently, depending blah blah blah snort scratch sniff, whereby it is an Art, not merely a source of Study. Merry Christmas!

Accompanying the Art of Language is -

2. The Art of Work

Work is accomplished in anticipation of future rewards or in reaction to past annoyances. Like language, there are many kinds of work to take up your time. Jobs are everywhere in today's Yuletide where communication and or persuasion or resentment are at a premium, so grab a shovel and dig it, 'cause you're flipping time instead of words and THAT is an art, pally.

Staying personal with conclusions, I propose a final New Art:

3. Weight-loss

May I share? If you stop eating, your metabolism slows to that of a snow cone; if you exercise too much, your body will seize up and veto fat burn. Rather, try a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Mix and match. Let moderation be your by-word, and lay off the ice cream. Weight loss is an art.

Like Folks and Fire

2010-09-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

Several items vie for the top spot on today's agenda.

No one - and I mean NO one - works as hard as the ladies of professional rodeo.

Sortes Virgilium works as it did 30-odd years ago. It is I think my one remaining superstition and I would be hard-pressed to believe that you or God or his kid would hold it against me to be astitioned in this way. I interpret the results to indicate that I am advised to proceed as the Rutulians did, to battle as if the way were clear. This makes perfect sense as goodness knows {to mix metaphors} that I am my own barbed wire over the Belgian farmers' field of poetic conjecture, and am self-foretold that short of perfection there can only be a perfect futility. Fucking Virgil. Pre-Christian, causality-blind, bleating son-of-a bitch.

With a new manuscript comes a new though echoing silence. New, for it is birthed with hope; echoing, for I am the master of the time and place of its death.

With time comes understand and with understanding comes bafflement.

Let those who are in doubt visit Pendleton at the time of Round-Up, where prior to the Battles of the final Twelves, there will be the fly-by of the F-15's at an altitude that would strain credulity - first 4 - then 2, then 2, whereupon you will be glad they are yours, and vice versa.

Being of a piece is all I can manage for I cannot control what you imagine from your desk or front porch or what you will say tomorrow or the next day. I am largely incapable, in the classical sense of the word, halitosis.

I believe - meaning, I can only fully endorse or comprehend {though I can understand so, so, so much more} - poems and such that give every indication that they would provide themselves as apparent-in-themselves to intelligent readers now, 1000 or more years from now, and 1000 or more years past - either that or poems or friends, for I am still beating. In other words, Horace is our competition - always has been, always will be. I have seen nothing in the way of local or global critical or anecdotal information that persuades me otherwise. I of course am a pathetic case, having no job in writing, so I have no cause to cure. This may all be pathetic, which may be perfectly right.

Philosophy can be trusted only when uttered under duress, or in verse and absent considerateness.

I cannot recall a philospher whose signal works were not produced except under duress or, in a real sense, against their wishes.

I have noticed that writings about music are often a kind of evidence of something gone wrong, for ecstasy is a virtue among the thieves of virtue.

Another, a fifteenth book. Lord, do with me what you will. I am true to my failings and punctual at that. I see that those who know me smile at last as if having held back. You are entitled to do the same.

Toast and Butter

2010-09-05T07:20:00.000-07:00

Capitalism and Christianity are not the problem. Your problems are the problem. Your questions and discussions, leading inevitably to repetitions in the form of indictments, are diacritical placebos intended toward substitutive feelings - a play, a pathos - not thought, not change.

The pathetic is neither contributory nor illusive. Small minds, small temperaments batter each each in the streets over a crust of bread, a stick of firewood, and eventually find themselves an empty doorway to settle in for the night. Your speeches reflect some inner condition. They do not share, they do not stick.

Let's say you have fallen from childhood and shattered - so the world appears in parts. This much you accept from our capacity to set a thing aside and discuss its merits and drawbacks. But you go one step further and demand change, even eradication, not as one who has outgrown his condition, but as a mouse might wish a world devoid of cats.

Poor mouse. The cats are here to stay. Real progress is personal. Solve yourself and word will spread.

How to Change a Tire: Part III

2010-09-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

No one who reads these words or who reads those of one who has read them will be anything other than a person already initiated into and likely irretrievably condemned to the strange practice of caring for unnecessary things. I do not question words, or language, but I wonder at the authenticity of the motives of the person or persons expressing themselves on any occasion, for any practical or impractical reason. Using the tools I have, I examine whether the blanket covers the body.

For all the pain and trouble visited on the Initiates into Unnecessary Things over the past however many years, you would think we ourselves would abandon the language of purity. But, no, for there is always it seems a newer, purer purity suggesting itself. The purity may be a politics of care; a poetics of sound; a family of agreement; a lifestyle of Green. What I do is position myself - socially, of course, for no one is Alone - in a kind of teleologically spinning armchair where my morning coffee, the newspaper, my mental notes, the cruelties of my family, and the sayings and perorations of a thousand acquaintances are as at my mental fingertips. When I speak, I speak through the filter of the pure, so that what emerges from my mouth is right, honest, and interesting. I cannot help but reflect that which has absorbed me, for I am above all else fair & kind, and am determined to leave nothing behind that will incriminate me or suggest selfish motives.

Where I am silent, I have spared you; where I raise a fuss - laugh along with me! Freedom is nothing if not conversation.

The sounds we make, taken as a force of nature, have a meaning as demonstrating a departure from silence. I am skeptical of all content; I am fond of any form. A sound created in form indicates a source which has come to the foreground with open hands, as it were. I appreciate that effort. I am prepared to match movement with movement - to duel: my understanding, your message. Form announces itself through form. I am instantly provided with a subject: the form of the message. What the message provides I may care for today, or tomorrow, or neither.

I have heard many messages and retained those that mattered. A novel form indicates another auditor who potentially recognizes what I do: that the human imprint on the message is what gives content meaning.

Form instantly imprints and conveys. I show up, time and time again, offering box-shaped poems because I offer box-shaped poems. You may like the poems - but don't let yourself be fooled. The form is my true offering. It is not pure, but it is true.

I am Blasted from a Laocoön

2010-08-31T19:58:00.000-07:00

Where he turns a corner, and seeing that he has been foolishly sad and too-long dismayed at what any one of a dozen earlier versions of himself would have disdained to diagnose, he pretends it all was a joke, this feeling sorry for himself, or asking for help from people who goodness knows have enough to worry about without the sheer caloric output required to empathize with a white, middle-aged, middle-class, self-ordained iconoclast.

There will be no statement of principals. We have nothing to contribute to that category - or we waver & quiver, our little human wreck, in a sea of Principals. Our open eyes - they are blue or green, depending on the light - carry the notes and messages and articles of friends, blushing let-me-mentions and inveighments and assorted perditionables; for ours is the most moral of times, as we are most correct, for science never has been rendered so clear and politics so easily side-stepped, nor right so wronged, wrong so rigid - what else but to agree with the thoughtfulness-sustaining air.

Everything I for so long believed I knew which clearly I for a time have more or less abandoned - and rightly, for I was an ungodly mess - I now give over to my son and his vision, where he informs me of who and what I am. I have before me being right as being honest with respect to what I can do. Today. And so a nine-year old teaches me himself and myself near-simultaneously - unconsciously? I sometimes doubt it. I am too fond of my son to doubt him for my own sake.

Which brings me back, for first principals are those tenets remembered in time across time, how individuals touch, approximate, a definable or expressible limit to understanding. Let's say expressed more or less broadly, literally or metaphorically, through word or musical sound, in paint - politically? (Don't bother me) - but, really, a "first" tenet? What kinds of assumptions are these?

Mine. God forbid I go to my grave, emblazoned across my headstone, "He Stopped for Conversation." Tenets. Well, you faltering nincompoop. Here's another fine miasma you've willed for Us and Others.

There it is, I've said it. Will. I believe in Will. I have seen everything I have lived through, and it has tended toward and continues to support the notion, the central notion - the tenet - that one is capable of will, and that will is the engine of one's destiny.

Destiny. Now there's a term that doesn't get bandied about much. Well, you see there was "Manifest Destiny," which of course poisons the notion or use of destiny. And, really, - aren't we talking about God here? The Christian God, that awful tool of the willers of destiny? Hmmm? Aren't we? Hmmmmmmm?

Well, no. We're not. Though it wouldn't be a bad thing to trot in the Christian God where that trope (at the very least, citizens. Citizens.) might contribute to the depth or flavor of the conversation- but, stay. We say Destiny in the self-same mood or frame or reference where we might say Hope. Now, you approve Hope, I know. So let's stay friends.

Destiny, said a poet (a poet is a person, a person writing poems; a poet is who wrote one or more poems; poems arise from and have arisen from the particular activity or, let us say, fingers of poets), is not unlike poetry, where one falls forward without knowing exactly why or exactly where.

One ultimately is responsible only for oneself.

We cannot not know this.

The agents or precursors of destiny, our models, so long digested and exhausted that the very air, this day, vibrates in accompaniment of their precepts, their Principals, cannot fail us, us all, you and I.

We only can fail them.

What is my role? I imagine I occupy a bit of land off a central road. Occasionally, a traveler might stop and and ask what I am doing there, or what my business is. And I would say - I believe this is what I would say, even here, now, even now - If you do not know what I do, and why, you have no need of me nor what I do.

Pass on, stranger. Pass on.

Poet at Sea!

2010-08-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

I am considering an idea for myself and would love feedback. After having spent years testing the traditional routes for publication with sporadic success, while amassing ms after ms after ms, I discovered and opted for self-publication. My Lulu books have isbn nos. and are published through various online retailer databases. The covers feature my drawings. I love my Lulu books. Others say they're lovely too. Fine.

Except that my Lulu books are not enough. They just aren't. I feel flatlined and I really can't see merely continuing with only my Lulu books. I need to publish at least one book through a third party publisher. One would be enough. Same old story, folks. I need to know I can do it and that it has been done. Call it ego, insecurity, whatever you like. I love what I've done - and I need this too.

So - my question to you is this. I wonder if I can pull from various Lulu mss and new poems to form a book, and would a publisher willingly publish that material? And, would anyone publish me, period? I have it in my mind that 99% of publishers would take the form I write in as a sort of personal insult. I mean, it can take the wind out of your sails to be limited to typewriter fonts. Should I try contests? Other avenues? Do I need to build up a fresh batch of magazine acceptances (God forbid).

Related thought: I have an FB group called Concrete Formalist Poetry; I have a website entitled Concrete Formalist Poetry. Should I start afresh with at least the website and just set up a more traditional author site?

Sorry to be at sea out in the open like this. Say anything you like if you have time, here or as an FB message.

Thank you.

Mr. Gray's Panoplies

2010-08-01T19:50:00.000-07:00

We have been prompted and tutored to interest each other and ourselves, and I value those lessons. Here, as an example, I am concerned to write about growing older - though not about the process - but to share what I hope has the look and feel of an insight or two, and certainly not about any mere fact, for what could be less interesting?

Well, I have been searching and wondering, and at times despairing, as my blogs demonstrate, don't they. And you have read and understood, I am sure, because we make ourselves understood more or less perfectly, one way or another. But even as hard as life has been at times, it has never been impossible. I know this looking back, seeing all that remains intact and even bits of constructive work dotting the landscape. And now I can say, getting older is no picnic insofar as when your mind or body shifts in place and you can no longer do things as you once did them and are compelled to make changes.

This business of shifting and changing, if you are very lucky and can look back at it, takes place more or less throughout one's life, but at certain times the shifts are quite spectacular, and the changes are commensurately breath-taking, so that on looking back we might be pardoned for feeling like we have escaped some real peril.

But poetry, I feel, and writing about poetry, or about life and being a poet, is always addressed to people younger than oneself. Don't you? I mean, after a certain point, what else really matters? So these words may only serve to suggest future road bumps, and perhaps at that time they will have done some work having installed a helpful imprint of what-is-to-be.

With this introduction, I feel I have little left to say. I can't pretend that the changes I have undergone are universal. And it would be unhelpful at the very least to plant an idea of a thing that may never some to pass, or that would distract someone from whatever process is required to comprehend and negotiate their own aging issues. I mean, of all things, I wish least to be wrong. So, I am at a perspective where, once again, I wonder if philosophy saves us or ruins us for other pursuits.

Oh, never mind that.

I am surrounded by work and litter and am somewhat blinded to regret. So I pick out the musts of my present and future life and consciously plan to attend to those things. I apportion my time and energy, for I am a slave to both. I cannot manufacture time and I no longer believe I can do anything I want to do when I want to do it. I accept that I may not do everything I want to do even given the time to do it. I pull back another step (this may have taken years) and say, I will be certain to do what I must do. That will free me from a certain kind of anxiety and may preserve my energies. I can hope for this in the way that other people might pray for world peace.

...but what I do in actuality is think about what must be done and let the rest slide. And when I say slide, I mean slide. I have fewer opinions and less certainty than ever in my life. And why not? What should I learn if not that life/earth/history are endlessly various, that we are all faced with impossible decisions working with incomplete or ill-fitting theories fostered by imperfect upbringings?

I suspect at the end there are many answers and maybe a thank you for participating. The answers come and go and I wouldn't hang my hat on answers. I really wouldn't. That participation thing though. That's big. You hate to lose your handle on it, though you may at times, but there's a way back, or should be. There's got to be. Always. There's always one step you can take toward someone.

Fictive for the Future

2010-07-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

This is what is supposed to happen at the end of July as the trading deadline in Major League Baseball approaches.

The manager gets together with the owner at his office or over dinner. The owner asks the manager, Do we have a shot at the post-season, and (before the manager can answer) how far can we go?

The Manager shrugs.

The owner says, I need to know whether to go after Pitcher X and what we're willing to give up.

The manager says Pitcher X is a great addition to any ball club.

The owner is getting a little annoyed here, and says, Look, what can we do to make up the 6 1/2 games we're down on the Braves?

The manager says, Fuck the Braves.

Owner: Fuck the Braves.

Manager: That's right, Who gives a fuck.

Okay, says the owner, You tell me.

Now the manager can tell the owner what the owner wouldn't have even heard when the conversation started. His team is at best three years away from competing meaningfully in Post-Season. Three years at best, meaning it will take three years of acquiring and developing young strong arms, pitchers who can throw quality innings. Maybe even a closer. His team (says the manager) needs to stockpile AA talent - right-handers and left-handers with solid mechanics and a live fastball, in the hope (the mere hope...) that two or more will pull it together three, maybe four years from now and form the core of a staff including one or two veterans that will take them deep into the playoffs, maybe even the Series.

The owner is of course skeptical. That's a lot of maybes, says the owner. What about this year?

Fuck this year, says the manager. We're not gonna get there with this rotation. Adding one guy, even Pitcher X, won't do it. But we can cash in and trade some of the older guys who might help out here and there while picking up young arms. As many as we can.

The owner will ask, You have an idea who you want?

The manager will say, Yes sir, I do.

Observation during Wars - a poem

2010-07-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes during a war you will
see a bit of brick lost amongst
some ferns, suggesting confusion,
or at least a mutual disturbance
of seemingly irreconcilable objects,
whose characters neither suggest
the other nor cancel the other out.

Analogically, a shadow suggests a
different interpretation, or disturbance,
than does a silhouette, though
silhouettes are a species of shadow:
a shadow thrown (thrown) onto
a translucent or impressionable
surface, and at a perpendicular
angle so as to render the outlines.

All the while you will from time
to time think about the war, its
causes and possible remedies, the
culpability of this and that party,
extant now under this name or
another. You will want to get
the facts straight and you will want
to be able to express an honest opinion.

Labor Vapor

2010-07-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

My challenge is to recognize what I am - to perform that labor - rather than piss on (self-inclusively, of course, with occasional hints to the close reader) about what I should be.

It can be useful at such a time as this to recall my thoughts or opinions as a young man concerning writers about my current age who appeared "discontented," especially with themselves. I recall, they were loathsome to me. A man or woman of 51 surely has made of themselves what they can; if they have work, that is their legacy, good or bad or indifferent, and if they appear to be trying to justify themselves - or are carrying on more or less obviously about what they deserve (that others don't, of course), they are pathetic.

This opinion which I held at let's say 22 of people like myself who are 51 was the result of a well-rounded education in the arts and sciences. I couldn't agree more. 'nuff said.

And so, I am what I have done - which is a difficult truth to accept only in that I am not God or some weird self-signifying manly water-breathing unicorn.

Suppose or imagine then what's left to me. How about...I don't care. (Take that, me!) I can't miss. I obviously can't function or produce through want. Rather I am in a place - and what? I wil let you know when I get there. No re-makings or worried fingerings of this or that. Not silence, which signifies "shock" - no mere disconnection or lateralizations - criticism, politics, prose.

I may live alone and write three more books of poems, then die.

I would have liked that at 22.

Say Capture

2010-07-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

It is true and I hope good - tell me it is good - that my window for writing is somewhat narrower than it was 5, 10, 20 years ago. True, because I know it having experienced what need only be true to my experience; good, I hope, because the less one writes as one gets older, the better, I suspect.

To clarify, I do not look out of a window when I write, God forbid. This opening is flexible, fugitive. It is not a thing to see through, or use, or master. I cannot plan on it or prepare for it - let's say by getting up early, or avoiding distraction. It is a terribly flexible window that twists and turns. It is latex to my steel intent, which lingers, farcical, for such an opening to itself.

To write, I must feel I am at the edge of my understanding, which must be at some remove from my common understanding of my daily life; that what I write cannot otherwise be captured or remembered. Check that: that the writing is the understanding, though the "act" in itself is nothing unless one or another meaning has been provoked or relayed. That I will not capture or understand unless I write, and write well, and write thoroughly.

At 51 I am chock-full of all sorts of understanding. These do not have to be communicated through writing. Writing requires that the act is all that is left to me in order to capture or understand.

Writing suggests itself as the only possible activity at those times when no other activity will suffice.

And so I am at the edge of my understanding and therefore removed from myself in coherent ways. The window lasts for a time - not for days and days as it once did. I would like very much to somehow maintain this remove - but really, in my daily life I am already at constant risk for putting everything to the side but love and languor. And my daily life is good with family and work and a prompt, earnest ethic. I can describe all that, for all the good it would do me or you.

Writing (and drawing/painting) is the only means I have to capture what I love that lies outside of my reach. It is all I know that is peculiar to myself, call me what you will.

Fuck or Write and Fuck or Pray

2010-06-23T20:25:00.000-07:00

There are those who are born who hope they never die. We cannot change, however we may care, why. We call them poets, artists, professionals, parents, politicians, who have an unretractable urge (like a calcified talon) to project into the future. I write a poem in a bid for immortality. I fuck to be immortal, some core-self self-absolute that spilling my seed (or dropping my egg propitiously, if a woman) satisfies that bid for continuance. Born with culture; thus writing a poem should run so true as coming deep within my lover. What else. Plenty. Conscious of what I am told is God I seek the same - a shadow, a mimicking, a continuance. Baseball – a sphere seemingly disappears into a familiar sky; trains cross a desert; a painter’s brush eliminates planes, suggesting distance where he or she purchased a mere slip of canvas. I come, suggesting another world. Between your breasts a little map of Ireland. Born with culture. God taking a hand, available for speech, supplication. We raise a glass. The Ark of the Covenant. Israel, you and I, in a box, so written, crossing unfamiliar country. Fireworks and the Fourth of July. A bid for immortality on the back of a bull or a client presentation. Remember me, says the poet through the poem. This sperm, this egg, survive, let it please God. Let it leave you the mere corporeal You and the You you imagine me to be dead and behind.

You may be seated for poetics

2010-06-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

There will not be a happy-making conference about poetry or poetics. You will not make friends with everyone nor will they. You may feel anger and disgust. You may take it out on your co-workers. Your clients will expect immediate, top-drawer service, even as you are rifling through your papers in search of last week's notes. At night, making love, your mind drifts over words spoken into a microphone.

Just when you had things all set up. Just when you were ready. Look at this place. It's a fucking mess. Yes I went out. Yes I got a little drunk. Best conversations I had the whole week. Try not to worry so much. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

There are the big names. No, I counted them out. They don't have more letters than yours, but they are big. Many are big women. There are no big Asian/Americans here. I want you to think about that, because I asked you to, and because it's about people, it matters. If you can think about it, or respond, at least nod your head to show there's something there.

We call a conversation about people and their values and behaviors a conference on "poetics." Many of us write poems and have pretty well in the poem business. When I was a boy, I wanted to pitch the Dodgers to a complete game shutout over the Yankees in the seventh game of a World Series. It appears I am not a complete washout after all. So, even though I think you are full of shit, I love you as a person and would chase down your mugger or back you up in any number of disputes other than what matters most in poetry, where you are full of shit.

Talk Baseball

2010-06-21T23:24:00.000-07:00

I am one day older than what I was when I took my son to his first baseball game. This posting will not dwell on the oft-recited keen fatherly pleasures derived there from. Though I should say that I employ the term “keen” in the traditional sense, whereby one might describe the keen edge of a blade, where art has been brought to bear on an object of utility, perfecting it in its function.

And, but, this seeming digression serves to introduce my subject, which is the nature and purpose of Minor League Baseball (Triple A level).

Baseball, as it has been said, is a game for men sometimes played by kids. Nowhere is this observation better applied than with respect to the facts of baseball – or what constitutes the this, that, and the other of statistics, strategy, talent. A person or persons might involve themselves closely in the adult-oriented facts of major league baseball and remain completely ignorant of the analogical facts inuring to the minor leagues. Well, there’s life for you.

Enough archery.

You may poo-poo “minor” league ball; you may be ignorant of what it is or isn’t; you may not know what to root for or how to root for it. You may live within some sort of geographic/realistic proximity to a minor league team and not even know it (they run Rookie League - sometimes called Single A; Double-A; Triple-A). I undertake this article to tell you a few things about minor league baseball of which you may not be aware, but should be, because any asshole can root for the Yankees, but it takes a man or woman with guts (or a sense of humor – and I would hesitate to suggest that courage and humor are ever much parted) to root for the Portland Beavers.

In short, here is what you need to know about Minor League Baseball, species: Triple-A; sub-species: The Portland Beavers, established 1903.

• Guys at the Triple-A level are better athletes than anyone you have ever known, unless you know someone who played on a major league franchise in baseball, football, or basketball.
• When I say “guys,” I mean every player on the roster of a Triple-A team. Whoever takes the field and whoever is in the dugout.
• This means these guys are better athletes than you, your dad, your mom, your brother, or your uncle who played a few downs for some shit-ass college team. Anyone you now know or have known.
• What does “better” mean.
• They have quicker hands than anyone you have ever known. Triple-A pitchers throw Major League stuff. Fastballs in the 90’s. Breaking stuff in the mid 80’s. Triple-A hitters can hit the stuff Triple-A pitchers throw.
• If you have a problem with a guy with throws only a 94 mph sinker or isn’t Nolan Ryan, let me tell you a story.
• At the age of 29, living in Brunswick, Maine, I decided to learn how to pitch. I bought a copy of Tom Seaver’s The Art of Pitching, or whatever it’s called, and I learned how to pitch. How to throw a sinker, an overhand curve, a change-up, and, on a good, good, day, a slider.
• I studied this book, and I learned its lessons. For I was relatively young and could not or did not or would not comprehend the end of things.
• At some point, a friend of mine who worked in the restaurant kitchen I worked in told me that there would be a tryout at a town nearby.
• A “tryout” is an organized gathering of local talent, set up by one or more scouts, usually wise old guys who know real talent the way the rest of us know bullshit.
• So I go to this tryout (I have photos to prove it) and threw my best fastball about 72 miles per hour. Maybe. Okay fine fuck you it was like 68 mph. And was politely informed See you later.
• The story though is this.
• Waiting my turn to impress the scouts, I played catch with a much younger pitching prospect, who you should understand right now had no real talent.
• He threw only about an 86 mile per hour fastball.
• I had to catch his fastball with my pitching glove, then I had to catch his curve ball.
• Catching his fastball was unpleasant the way being hit by a bully is unpleasant.
• His curve ball reacted in the air the way a snake reacts to a mongoose.
• So this is what you need to know: guys at Triple-A have Major League ability.
• You have likely never had to deal with them on the field, and if you ever have, you would know exactly what the fuck I am talking about.
• Many of these guys have played in the Majors or will.
• A guy’s likelihood of playing in the majors depends on a lot of factors, like, does the Major League team have a spot for him; who would he replace; can the guy hit DH (Designated Hitter); does he "project" (scouting term) to being an impact player, a daily player, etc.
• A guy will get called up and given some time and the scouts are watching and writing reports and the coaches write reports.
• The guy might get called up again or not. Maybe he gets traded. Injuries play a role, etc., etc.
• All the time, this guy is a better athlete than anyone you know or have ever have known. All the time, people with an investment are assessing him for a return on their investment.
• If the guy plays enough innings or whatever in one year in the Major Leagues he qualifies for the minimum Major League salary, which is a simply Christly sum – I mean, like 400K or whatever - even though good Triple-A salaries are not half bad.
• Do not expect me to look this shit up.

Side-note: Seaver’s book saved my good looks and maybe something more. The year following my self-tutelage I migrated to Philadelphia where I was starting pitcher (right-handed) for an over-30 league team. On one particular occasion, I sought to finish off a team’s clean-up hitter (a taut, bearded, brown-eyed right-hander) with a lovely slider over the outside part of the plate. It broke, and he leaned into it and hit it at something a good deal greater then my best fastball speed directly at my nose. Happily, Seaver taught me to “follow through” with my glove in position to react to such an occurrence appropriately. I had exactly enough time simply to elevate my glove and catch the ball just in front of my face.
• That was the first and only time I have heard an umpire exclaim, Whoa.

So, the moral is. Go see a Triple-A game by yourself or with your kid. You can get great seats for a joke compared to Major League prices. There is constant entertainment – promotions, give-aways, contests – and every opportunity to meet these young (and sometimes not-so-young) men and:
• Get an autograph of a perhaps someday Major Leaguer
• Get an autograph of a perhaps someday Hall-of-Famer
• Just say thanks and good luck. He will need it.

Tendon

2010-06-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

I seem to remember ambition serving to clarify. Perhaps available choices and techniques. Game plans. Perhaps a worldview in locating a point of light in the distance. So I would return day and again to locate that point of light. Now I am surrounded by forms of ambition. Some are dead or accomplished and others shrieking phantasies. Most are arranged in a subtly horizontal plane covering about 270 degrees, coming in and out, wavering, eyelids at half-mast. But in the quiet of now I hear a sound, and I think it is a true sound, as it enters my spine between my shoulder blades and spreads to my forehead. Even so, I cannot seek what I am sense. I occupy some other kind of ground.

5 of 5

2010-06-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

I wonder at feeling and understand, at their interplay. I am living a time in my life where feelings create openings for understandings .

To know a thing, not merely to think it.

As I achieve a particular understanding, I recall the thought of it. I recall the thought of personal balance. I recall prioritizing, and rest, and kindness. Thoughts and conversation though are nothing to understanding. One takes action and for a time - it may be just a moment - one holds oneself in thought, and understands.

I feel as if I pass through understandings, whereas thoughts can always be revisited. Thought perhaps is the architecture to understanding.

Thought, clothed in feeling, is understanding.

Would I achieve, hold, understand, without first having thought? I don't think so. Thought and conversation precede understanding, but they do not displace it. They may in fact, in certain instances, delay it.

One so one achieves, one holds an understanding, then moves on. I may experience a sort of plateau effect, then understand something new. The understandings may be of a specific or general sort. At this moment, for example, I am occupying a sort of compendium understanding of my present life, where I have made time and space for myself and freedom from distress. I understand that in the sense of void which accompanies solitude I must believe in myself. I must chase away self-doubt, and shame. I must everyday seek quiet and wonder as others seek food and shelter.

It is right and proper that I am doing what I do now - what I do today, openly, and without regret.

How else will I know what is new in my life, or feel the difference that is understanding?

1, 2, 3, and 4 of 5

2010-05-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

Taking some time to myself, I went to Powell's Bookstore (Hawthorne) to obtain credit for some objects which were useless to me. Such as three weighty volumes of the this-and-that of Dieter Roth, dragged into the piddling craft of my existence, when all I had were whims for hope and clarity.

Those, and Hemingway's A Movable Feast, which I have read and enjoyed countless times. Too many countless times. I have became all at once very tired of Hemingway, his decisionings and opinions of people - their faults and sadnesses, being very much ours too, after all. So I suggest, read AMF for the descriptions of Paris which I think are quite true, but read it only once or twice. Try not to fall into line with Hemingway's decisions and conversation.

In the mean time, while the books were being evaluated I scanned the shelves for something interesting. My habit is to look for older 20th Cent. editions, or someone French perhaps - or nice older New Directions books. I found a book of ee cummings' erotic poems, F. O'Hara's Lunch Poems, and a truly nutso and delightful book by K. Patchen. And what I say is this. I have not enjoyed looking for books in this manner in years. Putting a number to it, I would say 20 or so, since college. I say I have been struggling and doubting and numbing. It got to the point of distrusting bookstores, which is to say I distrusted myself and others like myself. How odd and sad and odd. How glad I was to recover my old habit and find it useful to me!

Happy with these books of others, I came back to my place and turned to a question that has been troubling me very much, which is the question of whether my books, my self-published books, make me happy. After all, no one will ever stumble upon my work at Powell's. Not unless I end up being someone who is really something, which I don't think I will. What should I do? I took copies of my books and laid them out on the carpet, then took my newly purchased books and others I like (Follain, Bory, Ponge, Apollinaire, Prevert (Dude. What's with all these French guys.), J. Beer, G.G. O'Brien, E. Hartigan, Thoreau) and mixed them all up and stood back and thought.

I thought, Well Patrick, these books of yours are pretty odd, but they are not a joke. I am certain about that. And they make a kind of sense, and how do you feel? And I felt pretty good.

And now I can really get to work finishing up my fourteenth book called how we are home, being poems from 2003/2004 when I lived alone for a period of several months.

....These episodes, they have been clear in my mind for months or years, as if fated, written into the air I breathe. And then I live them, at the cost of pain to others, for which I am truly sorry. Still, I can't take over-seriously something I know must happen, which happens as it must. I am too happy, or is that relieved, to take myself too seriously just now even as I feel closely the pain of others.

Reversion

2010-05-08T11:53:00.001-07:00

A variety of care lands us in the soup. Care, sunshine, vintage cars, a pair of slim calves.

A life is stitched together, or built with blocks. And when a thread emerges, are we unravelling or stitching anew? Who is in control here: the fabric, God, or the person corresponding to a name on a social security card.

There is a natural argument, I contend. To work, refresh, and work again, that has been missing from my life. Thread or no thread, I have launched and am now countless days at sea in search of that argument. I cite and apologize for disrupture. I am alive to the issues.

Live or dying, I hope I can respond to the tap on my shoulder with a meaningful statement of my condition. I may not speak to you about what you are feeling. That does not mean I do not care.

How much of this is condition, and how much choice? I rebound from such mists as if electric-shocked. I must have coffee and make plans. Sunshine and cars, a movie, a new place to stay. Dreams, dreams, a body of work and dreams. How should one be disappointed in what we all already know?

The Chair

2010-04-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

I will say, I had a conversation with a man who manages to speak to me through the dreams of a life I would never have imagined for myself. Certainly, no one predicted or promised me this. He says, I followed no manual. He says, I have forgotten how others live.

True loneliness seeks no recourse. It is aloneness. The state of being oneself being alone. If I am lonely I know what I miss. I am alone and cannot put a name to happiness. I have withdrawn from anger, pleasure, and pain. My writings are telegraph posts to a world that returns its messages to an abandoned outpost. Every day I steer an uncertain course; whether I will take my next step or collapse, I wake uncertain, fearful.

It is, I am certain, the life I have chosen for myself. Obligations and sin have a similar look and feel. But I am so worn by conflict I act by avoidance rather than acceptance. I negotiate a nightmare ocean littered with natural and human wreckage and never put into port. I am a lesson to my son, to be sure, but of what I can't imagine.

When I was lonely, I was sad, but I was alive. What I feel now is not living. I think of death as a kind of graduation ceremony. A new beginning. Something pure which cannot fail and which I cannot dilute. I coax myself to sleep with thoughts of knives and water. I am like a planet made suddenly aware of itself in infinite cold. Or better yet, a chair. A thing you pass by every day, which prompts no thought of what might happen next. I am best myself when prone and drifting.

"Sunshine"

2010-03-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

What is my job? My job is everything I put my hand to. Over time, the lines between job and non-job have blurred. Perhaps you have driven in the country and seen a field half given over to shrubby growth, odd grasses, bordered by a fence of sorts. Some body owns that land, and maybe they decided to let it go fallow, or they stopped farming for some reason, or the guy dies. Maybe they’re going to sell it. Well, that’s not what I mean. I am not a shrubby field. I am someone driving by this or that shrubby field, thinking about it. Now I’m the guy writing about thinking about it. Maybe I will buy that shrubby field; maybe it’s mine already. There probably no particular shrubby field – right? – I’m just saying “shrubby field” the way you say “sunshine.” Look at the sunshine, not this sunshine over that sunshine. It’s a condition, not a thing. That’s how I feel.

So with stories, jokes, poems, tasks & errands, work, play, love-making, Christmas shopping. The condition is the thing; the thing is not the condition. The thing is contributory, like the wind that pushes a boat across the sea. You wouldn’t say the wind crossed the sea; you say the boat crossed the sea. Both boat and wind – and sea, for that matter – and sailor and food for the sailor – all are contributors and spectators. Things matter – of course things matter. There is nothing without things. I am speaking about perspective. I am describing what I feel. I am feeling and writing. That is my condition. It is not a secret.

Beauty Stay

2010-03-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

My wife Endi, who is remarkably beautiful, asked me what is the most beautiful place I have seen. I answered that I see beautiful places and things every day. Pressed for details, I mentioned a brick wall I had seen, or recollected.

That answer though was incomplete. The complete and honest answer is that I am impressed by everything I see with a strength of impression that equals that of beauty. The last thing I can remember that struck me as extraordinarily beautiful - in an artistic way - was one or another scene from a ballet we saw here, in Portland. But then, I can't be interested in being impressed by ballet. That is simply ballet doing its job and me agreeing with it.

On the other hand, I am very often bored by efforts at beauty, or truth, or interest. Is this because the blank wall in front of me just now, spotted with a few abrasions, hung with a picture, showing its age - is it because this wall impresses me with a force equal to that of beauty, that a poem or painting seems superfluous? Am I sated?

Yes - I am sated. I do not worry or yearn for truth or beauty. I know that countless individuals and collectives are striving to make their point, and from out of their efforts will emerge notable works, etc., etc. I know there are victories and tragedies - over-reachings and fallings-short; moments in the sun. All of this plays out in my mind as a kind of background music, as if living near a playground, the window open. I do not choose - I have no power to choose - between the weight or worth of this wall and a poem as representative of work or play, truth or beauty.

It seems to me that some art aims at this kind of understanding without actually achieving it, of course - without reserving for itself pride of place in having made a "discovery." I can't help but be skeptical - don't you see? - of the products of an effort made redundant by blank walls, walnut trees, empty bottles, spinning tires, even a bit of blue sky. I stop and look and am frozen by possibilities. Perhaps this is too much to say at once. I mean no disrespect.

Cherry Trees When

2010-02-27T17:38:00.000-08:00

I am interested in a thing, and that thing is the junction between the historical and the non-historical. The historical is the past and the non-historical is the present. Perhaps the future also is the non-historical. I couldn't say, as I know only the present.

What brings this topic to the surface of reflection is the cherry tree, or cherry trees, blossoming. Cherry trees are blossoming here and now, which does not interest me as much as the thought that people are inclined to look forward to cherry trees blossoming. I along with others anticipate as I look forward to this blossoming, with a firm awareness of what I anticipate as some then-present moment when the cherry trees blossom. Incredibly, the blossoming of the cherry trees wil and does occur, or does not change, and as such is a fixed occurrence, though the experience is of such particuar complexity it rivals any given musical performance, note for note, nuance for nuance.

How it is that we recollect, anticipate and experience the blossoming of cherry trees is not easily explained I think, but it is interesting to me, and stands hovers about in my mnd as representative of the junction between the historical and non-historical. This junction I pose to myself in simplistic terminology, something like, "How can something be and then have been," or "What is the past," or "What was the past like." Now, I may be thinking, as others do, of ancient Rome, or the battle of Gettysburg, or pioneer life - or, it may be of a matter of a moment ten minutes past. For I find that even the recent past seems impossible to me to calculate or recapture, so removed it is by having crossed this divide, the junction, as I perceive or refer to it, between the non-historical and the historical.

So far so good. Yes, but think what this means. After all, we know the present is for all intents and purposes impossible to capture, and the future is nothing other than the universe of the possible admixed with the inconceivable, and so - tell me, what is reality? Even as we read a familiar book the associations drawn from the words at the top of the page are flailing about, fading or blossoming as may be in our minds, while other words are captured and released in turn.

In short, from this perspective, reality seems a small thing to study or concern oneself with. Fleeting and in flux, unknowable, impermanent, a glimpse of a thing - like looking out an office window where a body just now flashes by.

Live Carpenter Ants

2009-12-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

I believe I have exhausted doubt. I have given it full rein to express itself, to show me what it can do. The results were miserable of course, but that is merely doubt being doubt.

In lieu of doubt, I perform, in the way sound substitutes for silence. I come to my work and my life like a ghost made mortal, filling his old shoes just as they were left. Where, and when, I doubted I lived my life at half-speed. Doubt gave me no insights to the world as it is or myself as I was. And certainly there are no dreams in doubt.

I learned from doubt to avoid it. To examine it, perhaps, to employ doubt in the suited form of skepticism, yes, but to avoid contact with it. In the moment that accept what I am, I am free of doubt. How else can I change or enact any controversies unless I believe in myself as a mechanism? All can be doubted, all can be freed from doubt. There is much to do.

This Air

2009-11-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

I have been living in wordlessness, drained of thought, exhausted for ideas. So that when I turn toward the facts of my mind, I am blinded by physics. I am required to know in an instant and sense things perfectly: images, distances. I cannot survive long in this air without assuming I belong, and so I write, like everyone else, and if no one taps me on the shoulder or if no two people require me to move, I will remain exactly where I am, head down. Not in an attitude of prayer, but of resistance.

One Green Tractor

2009-10-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

There is no clearer sign of health in a writer than wordlessness, allowing that the writer is a subset of the person, as it indicates you do not have the words to express what your are thinking and feeling. In time, you will, but for now you must live in worklessness.

In this instance, I articulate my interest as a consciousness, even curiosity, concerning the point or range at which a poem, having been written from out of one's experience, thought, or feeling, reenters the world of experience, or if it does; and, if it does, is it in the form of the poem or another form.

I have lived under the assumption that a poem is a poem, that any one thing thing is itself. I have believed that the business of art is to render experience, and that the object of art contributes itself as a thing rendered. But now I mistrust these notions. Let's look at a green tractor, acknowledging the myriad associations that accompany our looking at it. This is more complicated than it appears, this tractor, for in time one begins to wonder where the tractor ends, and the world begins; and so what about poems, which we send out to publish or publish ourselves, or read at public gatherings. At a certain point, a thing reenters the world from which it has called out for examination, as it aligns itself with the examiner.

I mean to suggest, or it appears I am tending that way, that we risk our intelligence, our sensitivity, with a language of perfect ends and understandings. I think the conscience resides in sensitivity and susceptibility rather than in conclusions: that intelligence is in the nature of a state of risk and dismay. That a thing is and can be known surprises no one; that a thing known speaks to its own purpose in becoming unknown should disarm the casual, intelligent spectator.

The objects of our interest may appear to rise from out of the muck of everyday things, but that is a sensory fiction. We arise, in interest, in relation to our sense of ourselves unaroused. Interest is a function of time and purpose, with opportunity to give it depth. Like little sensitive tractors we paw about the earth of our collective experience and raise the dust of significance. No wonder then that we are disappointed when the dust settles.

Whether or not you believe in God, your work is in front of you. I cannot say now when a poem reenters the world, or even if I have captured what I mean by my interest. I am less concerned though about what I might mean, or what I might understand that I cannot express. So, as to purpose, I am in a real sense resolved, if not satisfied. What else would I call work?

Learn to write

2009-10-12T06:31:00.000-07:00

I say "form' to myself, repeatedly crossing that threshold. Exhaustion renders blank what might lie in front of me. I maintain that I am being denied a result, a thought, a product.

Even effort is a kind of ghost, or a too-difficult assemblage of parts and timing. I am not critic enough to lead myself to the woodpile. Instead, I limp from self to self, each permutation having just vanished, often while making a point.

Worst of all are the dozens of people that surround you, and you having nothing to say. They run on and on, much of it quite convincing. You can stop no one, you can say nothing. I tumble from task to task, causing no harm.

If I demonstrate, I am caught. I cannot retire. I cannot rest in my sleep.

You do not write. Your brain and body write. You are represented by a name you put to things you cannot do. What do I call you now?

Write About

2009-09-27T10:16:00.001-07:00

Criticism is a general term covering all sorts of writing which take as a starting point another piece of writing. Poetry is a general term for a writing which intends to produce an effect in itself. Criticism and poetry are often quite different in this way.

Critics sometimes appear to believe that their writing should produce a particular effect however. The effect often is to intend to impress the reader with the critic's thoughts, if not his writing. Good criticism (and I think there should be at best good, not great, criticism, this being a social skill), should make one mindful of the subject of the criticism, which is to say a particular piece or set of writing, and the writer or writers responsible for it.

I am certain I have read good criticism. I now avoid bad criticism. It occurs to me to put my hand to writing good criticism, or the sort of criticism I would like to read. I hope I can justify the effort this requires by entertaining or pleasing my writer friends! Well, at least I can do something to describe a sort of principle which might lead to other principles, or qualifications of our shared experience as readers and writers.

Further to principles, the story is in the telling, not the outline. Criticism should be well-written, which I take to mean that the writing should not distract you from the content/tone/implications/meaning being related. There is no one thing or set of things we can believe poems can or should do, any more than we can believe - and I mean believe, not expect, or wish, for, or dream about - that people should say or feel one particular thing or set of things.

I think one goal I would like to accomplish in criticism is not to complain. Not to complain about what a piece of writing does that I do not like, not to bother with what might have been that isn't. Not to criticise, not to annoy or bother the writer. I would hope to illustrate or lend credence to what is accomplished, to what happens that is worth noting. I see no reason not to share impressions. One can question, certainly, but the trick is to do so honestly - which means allowing the writer or reader an opening to respond.

In the end perhaps criticism must be a selfish act. I have admitted that I hope to write the sort of criticism I would want to read. That is, I have no particular ax to grind. I am not an employee of a University or press. I have all the fame I want as a poet, being perfectly obscure. What do I hope to accomplish? To bring some sense of relief to authors, any authors. To note and notarize. To make sense. To make some small bit of peace.

If you read this blog and would like me to write about your work or a friend's work, please let me know. Any piece I would seek to publish would be sent first to the author for comments, including where I might send my review. I may have suggestions where to send too.

Jonathan Swift

2009-08-17T05:21:00.000-07:00

I would like to give you a name. You wouldn't have to use it. You wouldn't have to thank me for it. I cannot give you the name just now, but I want to be able to give it to you when I am ready to, when the time is right. I ask you to trust me to know when the time is right, and to allow me to give you a name.

I ask a lot, don't I? I ask your forgiveness. If you will allow me to give you a name, I will allow you to give me whatever you like. I set no conditions. I already trust you, this much is certain. The only rule is, whatever we give we must not ask to be returned. We cannot be opening ourselves to each other and withholding ourselves from each other at the same time. I appreciate rest, yes, of course I do, but I promise never to withdraw.

Most of our time has been spent out-of-doors with no restrictions as to season. If anything, Summer holds us to ourselves somewhat. I hope I am not over-controlling. I hope you feel like you have had a hand in our games.

I will share a secret. At a given dozen or so moments every day of my life now, I wonder if it will be my last moment. That is, I anticipate my death with the frequency of a man hoping for an idea, and with some of the same emotions. I am wishful for insight and relieved that my world has not been tossed. Don't tell a soul. We are alone so infrequently, you and I.

What have you been reading? Good things, no doubt. And seeing good paintings too, I hope. Where does it stop, and why should it? Old men like us can clap as loud as any others.

The house is waking so I must go. Think about what I have asked - will you? Thank you. Let's stay in touch then.

Be. Serious.

2009-08-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

Being serious tires me. I am good for ten minutes, tops, before I begin to feel the force of life draining away and I begin, however clumsily, to seek a means or passage by which I might clamber back to common ground. Good humor is a conduit; seriousness is a cell. Perhaps that is why people who seem perpetually serious often appear over-taken with their own opinions. You cannot be a greater or should I say better fool than to take yourself too seriously.

But what does this mean, to take yourself seriously? I believe that within any given day one encounters instances that require a literal or meditative interpretation. Such instances - let's pick neutralish ground - such as balancing your checking account - call for an energy that cannot be replenished in the act. There is no conversation, no art. Enlisting oneself in the function of checking account balancing, voting, conflict resolution, business discussions, etc., is to enter in a contract which must have a set duration. Otherwise is madness.

There is a social balance, by which we feel free to act according to our personal interests on the one hand, while conducting regular correspondence with our community on the other. Seriousness threatens contact. One cannot be serious without falling out of love with much that is irregular, frail, and characteristic of the society we live in. Seriousness seeks to trim the edges of ragged joy and despair. It gives shape to the perfectly offhand, ill-fitting behaviors and occasions that represent most of life as we know it. What can be serious in nature, that never could draw a straight line? Be serious and you at once begin to lose contact with your source materials.

Humor therefore is not a rhetorical leavening of one's message. It is the best evidence of the door to source being left wide open. I am required to speak for myself and to do so seriously. Granted. The fact that I do so economically is a function of my desire to get back to the real work, which is gathering materials for a better life. I say what comes to mind that appears worth saying, but always I hope with an eye on an early if not elegant exit. Perhaps the gift of writing is the speed with which one can pass from community and nature to one's interior self and back again. To be serious, but only for so long. Not to lose sight of what harbors all opinions in common.

Oh You Lulu

2009-07-29T06:08:00.000-07:00

I've learned and confirmed a few things publishing my own books. First is that of all the writers I know, I am the happiest and best suited to self publishing. I am convinced that I am writing what I must write, and that it should publish, and in the form of the manuscripts I write in. I therefore need complete control and authority over the publishing process - absent, that is, a publisher falling all over themselves to please me, which cannot and should not happen. Whether anyone reads the books - well, my view is that if the work merits reading, it will be read. If it prompts consideration, there will be discussion. My job is to do the work and make it available. My job ends there. I do not have to promote my work - i.e., no readings, thank you lord.

More on the plus side: self publishing provides optimum control over my time. From start to finish - assuming a manuscript in hand - I can publish a book in under five hours. Then quiet descends, my obligations have been discharged, my mind is clear, and I can write something new.

I am fortunate. I do not have to make a living from writing - by editing or teaching, let's say. If I were teaching, this avenue would be closed to me. I would be compelled to seek a disinterested publisher for my work. If I were an editor, I would be that publisher for other writers. Neither of those livings appeal to me.

For one thing, being the poet I am, I find it helpful, from time to time, to forget everything I know about writing. I certainly have forgotten whatever I once knew about contemporary writing and theory. Oh, it's kicking around in me in some way, having been assimilated to some degree. But not having to explain myself or others is a great relief. A constant, refreshing relief.

For another, I am not in competition for that prize, that book contest, that award, etc. I leave all that to people who would benefit from it, who make a living from writing. Not that I would win a thing, trust me.

And, well, let's face it. Most of my models are very, very dead. And not one of them taught writing - or was even an editor, now that I think about it. Most had independent incomes, besides which there are a couple doctors, a lawyer, a couple politicians, and an insurance salesman.

What choice does anyone have, really, but to write and publish as best one can?

Un/Reasonable

2009-07-19T09:21:00.000-07:00

I try to be reasonable in my expectations, but I do not recommend being reasonable. I support reasonableness, and I avoid unkindness, and I think much can be made of the reasonable life. What supports reason is nothing different from what sponsors unreason, which is desire, in one or more forms. While unkindness is a reaction to frustration of desire, unreasonableness is an expression of desire. So, too is reasonable an expression, but it often partakes too much of the context for desire.

I like my desire whole cloth, as I am sure you do too. Where better to view the effects of desire than in unreasonableness. I am no pioneer in asserting this proposition. Consider the surrealists, dadaists, confessionalists, who seek to bypass the complex estates of reason for the pure waters at the fountainhead of the unconscious (and I will let that metaphor stand). I though do not mean to align myself with anything like a system of poetry or belief. I simply want to support unreasonableness, even as I work toward reasonableness in myself.

And it is work, I assure you. Though I believe something like this occurs, where one achieves one's goals in reasonableness and can then return to unreasonableness. I am skeptical though of the facility of my unreason, I must say. Given the work I have put in to become more reasonable, it is a sort of equal labor to return to unreason. Work of a different sort, a work of forgetting, or stumblng with eyes wide open.

Form when you said Form

2009-06-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

You asked, Why form? Your tone seemed to me to imply either that there should be another word for form, or a wish to retire form as a thing in itself. I brushed aside your tone even as I might have seemed to address it, with mere personal observations, and so we had a nice time.

But now, I am ready to address whatever concerns you might have about the word form or form as a thing in itself. Your concerns are my concerns, even as I confess that I am at my best self writing now. I mean to say, if you were to jump at me from an alley after I had had a long day at the office and wonder at the term form, I might not be so forthcoming as I am now. Perhaps then, for every value I assert from this point on, we should deduct a 20% wishfulness tax. I will let you decide that point.

True enough, writing is what gets written. So why form? One cannot be a formalist - or, be in a position of having been appointed with the term formalist - without having made clear certain broad decisions, or having arrived at a certain broad point of decision making, and having telegraphed same. From my interior perspective, I look upon a landscape that has little altered in twenty years. The landscape encompasses authors' works, scenes from relationships, places I have lived, paintings I have seen and painted, poems I have written, music I have heard (live and recorded), episodes from jobs, travels, vacations, daily routines - all these things, as I have said, occupy a landscape little changed.

So here we are at a defining perspective: the interior landscape has little changed even as the scenes populating the landscape have multiplied, some fading, others bursting into bloom.

What do I see in common to what I recall? Patterns and variations? Yes, I am impressed by patterns. More so - much more so - I am impressed by workfulness, by doggedness. I am impressed by thoroughness, by exhaustiveness. By fullness. By completeness. I am impressed by purpose as expressed in art. Whether it's Bach's works or Horace's or Pollock's or Milton's. I do put an author to the work, as individual determinedness impresses me. Passion impresses me. Expertness is fine, but a thorough, expressed passion trumps all else. The Ramones, AC/DC, Pollock (as I mentioned) impress me. And I am convinced that, while the particulars differed, we all of us share a similar interior landscape. That is, an underlying impression of purpose and place.

Another defining point: I emulate that which impresses me. And I am satisfied to emulate in purpose even as I produce new work. I seek to be as good an artist as the best artist is, insofar as our purposes are demonstrated in our work.

So, as to form as the thing in itself, it is an indicator of purpose, of will. I am persuaded that our will is our defining asset, and that it is in the operation of our will that we define ourselves as individuals. Form indicates an operation of the will. It is a signal of the individual poet's purpose in writing a poem. It is an assertion of purpose, and a challenge to the reader to match the poet's purpose. Rose and gauntlet, form predicates and affirms our purpose, our humanity.

A third point, and perhaps a final point. A person who writes in form has found a means in which to write. Form is a means, not an end, not a determination. Even as the form affirms, it gives way to the meaning of the poem in its specific, personal operation between that poet then and this reader now. The moral is, our purposes serve ourselves, our humanity, not mere things, or forms.

The will to form is underwritten by an understanding that will not pretend to permit purpose to surpass conscience. An urge to merely write in form produces thin, wishful works. A student's work. Rather, the form must be the vehicle for expression.

So, as to the word form, it is a word of purpose - of intention and measurement - like hammer, acre, or castle.

What do you say when you have finished for a time? I say, I hope to see you again, soon.

Before Canaan

2009-05-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

There is no point to pretending that there is any real operating principal here other than the the function of conscience. Why else. Why else care, bother, offer, and be concerned at outcomes. No, not outcomes. There is no outcome. There are outages, and outtakes, to be sure. But even clear results are clearly framed for context. No, I cannot imagine an outcome.

And there are no introductions. Everything is in some parts familiar even if only partially recognized. There is human noise and relief there from. There is work and there is sleep. The conscience runs behind it all, a thrumming machine - a perfectly white noise, by which I mean to allow any sort of implications the reader might incline toward.

What I think to write about runs in the background too until anxiety and/or occasion permits me to bring it to the foreground and rid myself of it. In this way, my conscience is the only one working around here. The body is a sort of machine or vessel for carrying out its prerogatives. No wonder I cannot imagine outcomes. As if my conscience would be concerned with where I end up.

With my material eye, I look to trim the craft, ease the difficulties, simplify. That is my contribution - well, it's an accommodation, isn't it, to my need for comfort. What is pleasure, after all, but relief; and what offers greater relief than fulfilling the dictates of conscience?

This is not to say that I can hope to achieve what my conscience is capable of expecting of me. If the conscience is the voice of the soul, then I may never accompany it. Perhaps this is a common condition. I am one person, and I haven't the energy or desire to presume what others think on this subject. Apparently, my conscience is concerned principally with my conduct and contributions. Whatever ideas I have which do not arise from my conscience are treated as mere suggestions, colorings which fade over time.

It is marvelous to see over a lifetime how little my opinions matter to myself.

Audience, say

2009-05-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

Poetry writing is the solution to the problem of having to write a poem. Without a solution, there is no problem, only a condition, or a tragedy. Tragedy is the fact of a condition without a solution. No solution is obvious without there having been a more obvious problem.

A solution is only as lovely as the loveliness of the problem. The heartbroken write lovely poems. Romeo and Juliet is the loveliest of tragedies. There is no solution to the ugliest tragedies. The curtain has yet to descend on the Holocaust. There is no lovely solution to the Holocaust.

When a poet is faced with the problem writing a poem (to solve the problem of having to write a poem) we experience a small sort of tragedy, because the problem cannot be solved except be the perfect solution, which mirrors the classical and mythological solution-making of quest and atonement. Every poet bound to solve the problem of having to write a poem is a Ulysses seeking to place him or herself at Penelope's side. A poet understands the Odyssey perfectly. It is a narrative whose drama resides in what will not and must not occur, not in what does occur. What cannot occur is Ulysses not obtaining the only possible solution to his problem. What occurs between the positing of the problem and the occurrence of the solution is purely historical and incidental. It should be sad though that as the solution to the problem of having to write a poem is obvious, it cannot be a great tragedy. It can be a minor tragedy, but not a great tragedy.

The poet who has written his or her poem has obtained relief, but has not achieved an end. Writing well - even fame - is not a solution to the problem of having to write a poem. Perhaps it is a consolation. Perhaps it is a separate gift. I feel that whether I write well cannot concern anyone but myself, as you have any number of models for writing well, if indeed you feel compelled to write, to solve the problem of having to write a poem by writing a poem.

Form Problemata

2009-04-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

(1) As Abraham packed his things for the journey to Mount Moriah, he considered what knife to select with which to slay Isaac. "It should be the best knife I have," thought Abraham. He found the knife he was looking for, featuring an intricately carved handle. As he weighed it in his hand he thought, "I am a vain and silly old man. What I do is for the Lord." And so he laid aside the decorated knife, and went into the stables and picked up the knife he used for all such occasions, the knife for sacrifice.

(1)(a)Form is the historical, not history.

(2) Once upon a time there was a young man who lived at the outer edge of a city, near the ocean. While he didn't visit the ocean often, he was conscious of its presence, as it lay in the one direction only his mind could travel. In time, he began writing poems, and in time, his poems assumed a form and shape not unlike a craft with which one might ply the ocean, or draw about oneself as protection from the ocean.

(2)(a) Form is the person, not the people.

(3) In a democracy, you and I find each other through our efforts and the willingness of others to transmit others’ efforts. Payment is proscribed in a historically founded vein of transmission. In a similar vein, we say yes and we say no. Even with the years having passed and all the yeses and noes, we find each other through other’s willingness to transmit what we say for some kind of compensation: and understanding, or fee.

(3)(a) Form is the poem, not poetry.

Then, Pendleton

2009-04-11T08:03:00.000-07:00

I hope to publish another book someday soon, within a few months, let's say. It would be my thirteenth manuscript. I should review my publishing, which is I suppose part and parcel of what I do or who I am.

I pursued for years the standard procedure of sending out poems to magazines. Some got published. That process was never a pleasant one for me. Even publishing felt like an objective, material sort of pleasure. At the same time I became aware that I would not pursue teaching, etc., and that a did not enjoy giving readings, and that most poetry bored me to tears (while all the time I was writing cohesively, producing the manuscripts I have now published) - so, in brief, at a certain point my dissatisfaction began to weigh on me until I could no longer write. After all, why should I when I had upwards of fifteen unpublished manuscripts?

The effect on a writer who feels compelled not to write is not a pleasant one. The solution occurred in order of obtaining a new computer, joining lulu.com, joining Facebook, setting up this Blog. Lulu allows me to publish the manuscripts I write as I have proofed them and at the length and with the exact content and cover art as I want them to be. Facebook has provided a platform for friendship and for showing my work and learning about and interacting with other and related poetries. My blog is given over to personal essays which are tuned to issues of concrete formalist poetry, more or less: more if you are willing to believe that whatever I commit to words must be in some way related to my central concern in writing poetry; less, if you are looking for content that directly, rather than analogically, corresponds with concrete form-making.

The manuscripts have almost always surprised me. They have their tones, themes, characterizations. The current one I think of as being titled "Rodeo Poems" and so it should come as no surprise that there is so far no mention of rodeos, horses, the American West, etc. But I suppose a rodeo is an entertainment posing as a reenactment of a spirit of a place now lost, and so these poems are the work of a middle-aged poet, and so on and so forth. I hope the manuscript is not lost from surprise. One can always surprise the manuscript, of course, by deeming it complete. This one though, this one will finish in August, I believe. Perhaps in time for the Pendleton Round-Up.

Read & Sleep

2009-04-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

There are any number of subjects, and any quantity of objects. Of essences, we have a few, which produce an infinity of impression.

At an given point, allowing that we have a mind that can be brought to bear on a given object, governed within a particular subject, and as we stand still to receive our impressions, clearly - the sight of ourselves in such an array is itself dizzying, setting off fireworks.

And in this vein, we or what we do might be memorable. And in another vein, we cannot know or stand still to verify how that memory is or will be constituted. All poets might at some point appreciate baseball, where talent cannot pause to consider the myriad effects of hitting a ball out of the park.

If this is an economy, and surely it is an economy; and if this is a politics - and it must be; I hope it is gentle and purposeful, that is, I hope it can be applied to the benefit of the one applying it.

Someone Said Forms

2009-03-21T08:38:00.000-07:00

I see no reason not to profit from one's misunderstandings. Every reach into the past is fancy. I have come to associate figures and incidents of recollection with emotionally marked values. They parade before me in all their fuzzy, grinning significance.

Who am I - or what would I be - to say what I am, that is not apparent to all, or what holds significance for me that would further explain what I am? And is it necessary to do so? Perhaps I have become a garden variety mere adult, living day by day propped up on the treasures and detritus of an obscure, indefensible history.

There is though an available and popular alternative to merely being, which is to chose to select a past and a form of the past, by which to conceive a form of the present. This takes energy, which is at a premium, and spirit, which perhaps I am too fond of denying myself.

The point, I take it, is to create, not explain. Not unless the explanation is in itself interesting and creative. Or, once one has performed the necessary introductions - which by definition will have been dull, routine work - the floor is open to you. Pity your fatigue or spiritless now, and the doors will close to you and yours.

But even so, I do not have ideas. I do not host concepts, though I am fully capable of addressing the odd construction. I see the value in understanding, in corralling this and that and calling it mine and yours. Somehow though I never quite can get around to this sort of work.

As I see it, I am equal parts filter, reflector, and engine. I possess an urge, I act on the urge. I appreciate the urges of others. I appreciate the significance of other and their contraptions. Mostly though I appreciate people's time, the act of having chosen to spend time writing, let's say, or teaching. I am certain people make a positive difference in doing these things, or at least maintain some part of what is positive.

What is significant in me is perhaps insignificant in others; what is significant in others is somehow lost on me. I will read your poems upside down, for all the good it will do me. While any explanation of myself would sing itself to sleep. I read this blog entry and am impressed that I am a terrible romantic, which says nothing about myself and less about others. And so I write, not to keep alive the question of who I am, but to clear my conscience of all that I am not.

Let me in

2009-03-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

I will do you no harm. I will be gentle with your things. I will listen respectfully, even tenderly. I will make you laugh. Let me in.

I have almost no science, and my art is a given quantity. My secrets and my mysteries are commonplace. Let me in.

At the end of a stone wall is a man who places his hand on the wall to steady himself. I cannot tell whether this is his property, or whether he is exploring. I have to go. I have an appointment I should not miss.

An Autobus

2009-03-08T08:08:00.000-07:00

I am almost sure we think less of ourselves then we should. And we think more of those around us than they do of themselves. Not that we are inclined to change what we do, or the way we do what we do, but we deprive ourselves, nonetheless, of consideration and remedy.

I have made an effort, in this condition, to forget what I know and listen to those around me. I hoped, and continue to hope, that this attitude would promote change. I can't see that it has. It has only increased my self disregard, and strengthened my impressions of those around me.

But then, my friends, I am quite certain, are capable of opinions, which they promote and defend. I am steadily losing the ability to hold an opinion, even though, in certain aspects, I feel much more sure of myself. I suppose I could offer an opinion here and there - but I do not want to lose options, or opportunities, or perspectives, that eventually may lead to more of the same.

If I am an animal, and I suppose I am, do I not want to occupy a position affording the greatest perspective allowable by nature? Or, there seem to be real reasons to be skeptical of the choice-making human, who steadily, methodically, eliminates options and perspectives until he or she has attained some absurd, and some cases dangerous, limited perspective.

You may suppose I am after all arguing for what is right, and that what is right is how I feel. But I am not. My initial comments are fully intact: for instance, I believe that my friends, who have opinions, are capable of tremendous perspective. In fact, I believe their opinions grant them a lifetime of option-making and option-selecting. I do not know that I have any perspective at all, except to wonder at what I am missing in all directions.

Of the clearest instances where I am incapable of maintaining a position is in the matter of what makes sense. There can be no limit and no hope for what makes sense in what might and, at this point, surely does qualify as poetry. I have no opinion of what is a poem, anymore than I have an opinion of what is life. If this seems wise, you are kind, or you are afflicted as I am in the ways I have outlined in this essay. You are both - kind and wise - which means more to me than my opinion of what is a poem ever will.

But I am a poet, I suppose, and so I should have opinions. Well, I believe I am purposefully confused, but I am not as curious as you might imagine. I have little interest in reading poetry, for instance. It all seems pretty much the same to me. I like reading what is different from what I write. I mean, honestly, I have been writing for near thirty years. What would I look for in a poem? For instance, right now I am reading Robert Louis Stevenson's short stories. You can imagine they are not like anything now being written, and they are uniformly at least well-written, so I enjoy them. It seems that, if I have an opinion, it is that I should be entertained. Not very poetical of me.

I shouldn't say all poems are the same to me. I like what is spare, elegant, and charming. I like several recent pieces by Litsa Spathi, for example, which you can see at the Concrete Formalist Group site on FaceBook. Like everyone else, I ask myself what it means when I like something. Unlike others, it seems, I have no ready answer to the question, or I am at the short end of a tendency to voice a coherent position.

My concern is for myself, my praise I reserve for others. A long life is made longer.

Add In Particulars

2009-01-24T11:59:00.000-08:00

I am one among those who can be named. I am not aware of being named, but surely I am named in some manner, in certain circumstances.

What do I do about myself, in light of the fact of being named, as any person or object can be named? I am not trying to be difficult. I am simply surprised at being named, and I am unsure what to do next. I think I am supposed to forget this perspective and concentrate instead on what I name. But, being surprised at this perspective, I am not willing to easily surrender it. Surely, there is some meaning to be gleaned from this insight?

Now, I know the rules. I shouldn't be writing unless I have gleaned the meaning, or I certainly shouldn't publish. If you are reading this, then I must have arrived at some further meaning, and perhaps you have skipped ahead to the end of this piece to see where it leads to so that you can get back or ahead to other work. How like you - I might say - or how like me, to anticipate your reaction! Aren't some things better left unsaid?

I can say that the fact of being named is startling but should not come as a surprise. I can say that I have only so much control of the ways in which I am named. I can say I am unconcerned. Surprised, but unconcerned. Perhaps I am excited. Certainly, I could wish for more, but I do not. I can't support in myself a concern for how frequently I am named, or in what context. I trust that I share with all nameable things the properties of duration, materiality, and interpretive congress. That is, we play about, wed, part, wed again, we who are named: the button, the parliament, and I.

To turn about: I will take care to name you tenderly. This is a task I set myself among other tasks. I don't know that it amounts to much, either my intentions or my actions, I mean. But, being driven to such preoccupations, I cannot be surprised at what I feel and say. All my promises are real. There is no limit to change.

My Friends Work

2009-01-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

My friends work hard. I know this not because they tell me so, but because I see them working hard. I see what they write. I see what they read. I see their faces lined with the trouble of work and worry. My friends work hard.

I know they work hard too because I work hard and we are friends. My friends would not be friends with someone who didn't work hard. Or, I should say it's unlikely. My friends would gladly be friends with someone who didn't work hardly at all, as long as when they did work, it was on something hard. My friends are not escapists or Lotharios. They are poets, writers, actors, painters, and philosophers.

I worry about some of my friends. I do not worry about the work. I work in a law firm, and some of my favorite people are partner-level attorneys who work insane hours. They are not dead, these people I know, not yet, and my writer friends will not die from their kind of work. And, as we know, anything short of death is food for thought. No, what I worry about in re some of my friends is their loneliness.

God, who I believe has gotten just about everything right, has perpetrated a bit of nastiness in that someone who does what my friends do for a living is likely to find it difficult to secure a stable lifestyle or therefore a stable lifelong relationship. This observation comes out of someone who has been a spouse of mixed blessings, you understand, so I make no excuses for myself. I though have the good luck to have the opportunity and determination to prove myself. But for some of my friends, such opportunities are scarce or hard won.

I don't know what to say to my friends sometimes. I know friends who are clearly wonderful, caring, able, loving people, who are alone - now in their late twenties, into their thirties, their forties, and then what? What I say I only say to myself, unless asked, and it is that it only takes one. One person to complete your life. And each life is in part a history of having found that person, who identically has found you, and in that there is a great deal of what God has done right and what makes this world what it is, for we cannot be determined only in determining, but in having been determined, by history, relationships, by context, by reality.

I want my friends to have what is meager and obvious, as well as what is laudable and brilliant. So what can I do except say, I love my friends. I believe in my friends. And I need my friends' support, for I am struggling in my own way too. Who knows what your love will be? Can such a thing be predictable? Of course not. Can such a thing be encompassed by good works? Yes, it can.

So here I am, admiring my friends and really not at all fearful. Not really, except as my imaginative limitations may disallow possibilities that some of my friends may be living in right now. Right now.

Pleasure Pleasure Pain

2009-01-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

I wonder if I am in a real sense exempt from pleasure and pain. I know I do not take it into account. I do what I must do, or I do what I am capable of in response to my life's mandates, and I accept pleasure and pain as some portion of the experience of response.

All my feeling, or what I experience as feeling, seems to be focused on impressions preceding my doings: am I drawn to or repulsed by the mandate? Now, you would think that being drawn to a thing (a day with my son) that I am drawn chiefly by the intense pleasure I derive from being with Jackson, but this is not so. The mandate to be a good father is in fact stronger than any pleasure I might experience in satisfying the mandate. The requirements of serving the mandate far outweigh an personal consideration. And even my feelings toward the mandate, or whatever specific actions are required that day to fulfil the mandate, for the mandate is constant and not a temporal or local occurrence, are only experienced fleetingly, and barely heeded. I know what I must do; what difference does it make how I feel about it?

I find myself doing things which, as a younger man, devoted to pleasure, I avoided. I go to social gatherings. I attend meetings. I pray. I read the New Yorker. I wash my hands before dinner. I listen and ask questions. I do things that I must and should do, willingly or no, and I am the better for it. But I cannot say I derive pleasure from all these activities. If anything, the pain I derive from exercising patience and civility is a sure indication of value. I know I cannot trust self to do what I want and live well, and so I trust myself in pain. At what point then does pain suffice for pleasure?

Writing poetry surely is a pain, a necessary pain. Writing however is the only possible response to the mandate to seek relief from the pressures that arise when, as a writer, you have not written. I sometimes wonder how it matters what I write, though it is clear one must write well, and to a sort of purpose or emotion, or nothing is relieved. Having written, the pressures build again, and the mandate renews itself. There is no pleasure in this, only a lesser pain obtained (writing) in deference to the unbearable pressure to write. One gives up, in time, the notion of accomplishing any one set goal that would give real pleasure or sustained relief. The writer finds him or herself exactly as he or she always has been: a vessel for conduction.

Pleasure or pain. Pain or pleasure. I don't know I see a difference. I seem to recollect writers who, it seemed to me, held out for pleasure, even as they lived in pain. But that may have been mere pleasantness writ across their features. And I can sympathize with the urge to be pleasant, to acknowledge pleasantness. It seems to me also that pleasantness, contentedness, used to be a great goal for adults. Now, we are harried to feel all the pleasures of youth even into old age. Well, I for one say that's impossible, and no thanks, besides. I do not want to feel what I felt when I was twenty, or thirty, or even forty. I want to do well what needs doing, right here and now, regardless of the pleasure and/or pain that swirls about me. And if I am granted some greater happiness, then so be it. But I'm not looking for happiness per se.

Why should I?

Speak for Days

2008-12-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

The first consideration in when selecting a campsite is comfort. Dry, slightly elevated ground, at least twenty feet away from any water source, is ideal. Once camp has been established, you can set out on hikes, etc., and in so doing, and with each return to camp, you will feel more secure in your choice. What is outside the perimeter of your camp will seem less hostile; what is inside will seem more wholesome. The exact perimeter of your camp will vary and depend on the terrain and the length of your stay. Over time, you may make slight improvements here and there. Don't forget to fill in your latrine and dig a new one every couple days. But camp will never seem like home. You are a stranger here. You have contracted to live here and to leave it as you found it, to the best of your ability. You cannot pack out your feces, but you will pack out your gear, and your memories, and your smell. The trees tolerate your presence. They say nothing and reveal less. Those within your camp perimeter may seem gentler than those outside. Your perspective shifts. Those outside seem more majestic. You want to camp further away from where you came from, your home. Check this impulse. Once you are home you can decide and plan on where to camp next, but do not camp from out of your present camp, not unless you have no home to compare your camp to. Go home first. You have contracted to go home.

Turn it in to Someone

2008-12-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

Allow this rummaging post, as I move from what was to what will be. Unless this is the what will be: a rummager. Oh I hope not. I like projects. I like a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like a thing with shape. I like to shape things. I am like that.

My life is taken up lately with therapy, working on my depression and frustrated behaviors. It's a long story, featuring a variety of characters contributing emotional distance, negative modeling, and downright encouragement to act in ways I now find difficult to fathom, so poorly do they represent my heart. I have to say things are looking up. I feel inwardly vacant, true, but I am not feeling or doing or saying the sorts of things that have made living so terribly difficult these past several years. I have the support of family. I am pretty well off. Let's hope I can repay them with the same sort of kindness and respect they have shown me.

On the subject of subjects, I haven't any. I feel here and there the urge to write, but when I sit down to do it, Poof! All gone. So I sit here not getting frustrated, not getting ideas, scanning FaceBook at odd intervals for directed or lateral posts to respond to. And I play MyFarm, a virtual farm game. No, I haven't much to say except to hope for more from myself, but without bitterness. Just a quiet hope. I make myself available. I read, occasionally, I watch a little TV. I love movies with Jackson. Last night it was Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

I look forward to work, cautiously, where I do well, but which is in flux just now as we have a new group head. I am of course turning cartwheels to please her and think I do, but you have to remain cautious in such times. I look forward to Sundays. Endi and I are alternating attending the Friends Meeting at the meeting house on Stark. I must say, those meetings are just right for me. It's night and day compared to any regular church service, and really, the precepts match up fairly well with my understanding of what's been asked of us and was suggested for worship. There's more to be said, but not just now, as I continue to rummage and mention in a passing manner.

On to poetry. I recall believing that a poem is a thing to be written when something must be said for which there is no other vehicle or means for expression. And I suppose I must continue to believe that. I feel sometimes a tendency to write, and could probably manage something that looks and sounds like a poem, but I feel no urgency, and so at the outset would be unconvinceable. Even so, I recognize that I could surprise myself. I am interested lately in more experimental works and poetics, so perhaps there may be an opening soon for some more composed approach to writing.

I will end there then.

Something in the Nature of a Box

2008-11-22T15:22:00.000-08:00

Is it a gift or a casket? It is the gift if a casket: reader, bury your desires. It is a casket of a gift: beware the offerings of strangers, for all pleasure is a foretelling.

As the composer of this gift I have no perspective. I have a condition. My condition as of the moment is that of a man who recognizes that he has accomplished what he set out to do. It is neither good or bad, this accomplishment. I have written the poems in the manuscripts I needed to write. I have done my work. I have made it available. I have settled the contract. In that, I take pride. I am through. And I will move on.

And so, I place and arrange the boxes of my strophes in the boxes of my poems in the boxes of my books into the box which is detailed in the beginning to the end, from the depth of my experience to the height of my ambition. I present this box to you, the reader. May you be as successful in doing what you set out to do, and a good deal wiser than I in recognizing when you have finished your work.

Watchful in Times

2008-11-15T11:01:00.000-08:00

I find myself on the verge of speech, then shy away, somehow fearful and afraid. I can't say why. I don't know why. It is not for lack of trust or content. Perhaps it is for lack of color.

So, I am working on a painting. I have been stuck on the initial image for a few weeks now. It is a paltry image. A burlap canvas crossed by separate horizontal, elongated patches of white gesso. Over two patches toward the bottom, I applied Phthalo Blue, then Phthalo Green to the other. Then I have a slash of yellow centered by a red swirl on a gesso patch up and to the right. All this will dry, then I will begin to actually paint.

So I am laying out my color, then I will begin to paint.

This process impacts the writing, but I can't say why or how. My personal world is very much up in the air, so perhaps my unconscious has seized on "color" as a vehicle for clarity and voice. I just can't say. Really though, this signification of color, sponsored by my ever-damnable consciousness, appears to have some pretty odd effects. For instance, I am drawn to a cherry red toy car at Target - for my son's sake, provisionally - but the car, the color, stays in my mind. I think to myself, I must have that toy car if I am to advance in my life. Just as I must execute this current painting, just so, or just as I must understand myself.

Even so, I am skeptical, seeing myself as middle-aged, grasping at odd objects and sensations as if to resurrect the impressionability of youth, when random occurrences were made to add up to something definite. Is that skepticism the key which will lead me to accepting a new relationship to the world, or should I follow my impressions?

I do not have an answer. For now, I lead myself to work even as fear the outcome. Perhaps what I am being led to by some better sense of myself than what I consciously accept, is a process and a completion which I can point to and rely on. I sometimes feel like I am one mistuned string away from a proper instrument, or that my pace is just out of kilter with those around me. So I go to readings, not reading myself of course, and I work as best I can in a mood of fearful watchfulness.

Civil in Poetry and in Marriage

2008-11-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

Experience suggests that strong feelings right the craft, eventually. At that point, one may notice one has company in the form of friends that have sustained you, sometimes with nothing more than their friendship; and in the form of commitments in the nature of decisions and breakthroughs on issues that you had time for when you struggled to write.

So we are righted, and we look about not wanting to lose anyone or anything. We look back at what we did to put ourselves in peril, making mental notes, then to the sides and ahead, suggesting to ourselves, I must remember this.

I was very young as a writer when I saw how little poets could say for themselves that seemed to me to take part in what I saw of their poetry. Well, we throw ourselves ahead in our words, don't we, and can scarcely be held accountable for a hit or a miss, for an appointment gone awry. Even when I am right, I have to laugh at how little it matters in a world where my writing is of all the things the least significant, my goodness. But when the words come with the heart racing, pushing them forward, I am with strong friends then, some of whom are listened to and who do make a difference.

We travel together, my friends and I. We depend on each other to be civil to each other, to remain friends. We count on each other to do the best with what one has, on a given day, etc. We do not keep track, I don't think. But we watch each other closely, because watching means learning, and learning tends to be good for writers and their families.

There's not much writers ask for, other than the right to be themselves and with other writers. Their commitments are real and quite strong. In this vein, the writers I know are asking for some certain rights to be granted their friends, that they be allowed to marry in a civil union. We ask this because life is difficult enough without two people who love each other not being allowed to sign the contract of their love. We ask this because we are uncomfortable asking for our friends' support in a society that grants rights so negligently, that it allows one to vote, but cannot recognize the right to commitment.

The right to marriage may eventually be composed in an act or an amendment. I can't say, being largely uneducated on what the actual goals should be. But I do challenge myself here and now to make a difference, to put time into the change that must and will happen. I am not alone in being tired of the stratification that inhibits this society. We must support and free those who so willingly and I think magnanimously call us friends.

Think Again in Think

2008-10-19T16:51:00.000-07:00

I will not remember myself today, though in every action I am present for purposes of memory. Whether I remember myself in what I do today is another story.

Age represents a "failing memory," which may be a fiction. I think I have become less reliant on memory, less impressed by it for my own sake, whereupon I became aware of the imperfections of my own memory. Loss of memory is hardly a cause of personal grief, though, I am sure to be impressed by others' good memory for their own sakes. But, again, I do not feel I lose anything in losing my memory. I trust I lose elasticity and capacity at the same rate as I lose memory, so all is being lost at an equal rate, and there are no regrets.

One point of caution: loss of memory is loss of hurt, and loss of hurt may influence one's writing, or whether one writes at all. All writing is the fact of having attained demonstration. Letters demonstrate a relationship; theses demonstrate an authority. Stories and poems can demonstrate almost anything, I suppose, but they cannot be called upon in the absence of motivating factors. Writing, even in pain, is a kind of victory, a thriving. One cannot thrive in the absence of one's memory of oneself.

In place of myself, I have the world as it is, or I should say the slim portions thereof that greet my eyes and ears. And I have books, which I rely on less and less as I grow older. A book is, to me, so easy and transparent a vessel of the author's own capacities to make themselves felt, that nothing can interest me that is well written. A book must be of a thing, and the thing must be of this world, thereby expanding what I see and hear, or might see and hear. Show me a qualified author and you show me only myself, to a greater or lesser degree. Such a representation does not interest someone at peace with forgetting such persons as themselves.

So, perhaps I know enough of myself and those who write to be able to afford to forget some portions thereof. I must admit, whatever portion of myself that is responsible for writing is much cleverer than that portion that wishes to write. And why shouldn't it be? Haven't I see enough of writers and their books not to be fooled into thinking that my desire to write is qualified in any way other than a personal desire to do so, however grand, however humble? While writing may work wonders, it is no wonder to me that one writes.

And so I outwit myself, and I sometimes wonder if I don't laugh at myself for a writing fool. And yet I have the last laugh as I write to spite my worldliness. I may not remember myself, or think the way I would like to, but here are the words to prove that I can constitute myself even in a present loss, which is no small thing, I think.

Block that Box!

2008-10-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

The writer - like many of us - will be the last person on earth to realize his or her work is done, that it is, to the extent of one's ability and human strength, complete, accomplished, and finished. This is one line of thought emanating from the central experience of having nothing to write. I cannot say I am blocked, as I have no particular push from within that suggests there is something to say which, owing to some psychological constraint or surplus, is not being said. I want to write and feel empty without it, but that is beside the point if I am simply an empty vessel.

Now - just to clarify one error - when I say "say," I mean write. I recognize the worlds of difference and the battlegrounds of say and write, and I honor those who serve this day, standing pike-to-pike with those who confuse speech and literacy. I think I do, anyway, and that is the point.

Another point I want to make is to indicate in a straight forward manner a few of my life's ironies. I compose in a box form. My father made a career in packaging. My boxes are poems; his boxes are boxes. My job - my paying career - is as a trademark paralegal. In my job, I assist the attorneys I work with to help clients obtain, register, and protect their trademarks - or, the words and design that indicate their goods or services; sometimes, often times, by labeling packaging and boxes with the trademark. I don't know if I unconsciously intended to please or surpass my father with these ramifying tactics. I perpetrated and awoke to these ironies, intact.

Other lines of thought are, in no particular order (though who can trust who on order): ideas are not poems, and poems are not ideas. There is no form in writing; there is form in having written. Writers who advertise a love of any given sport are not, simply not, being interesting or helpful to others or themselves. Absurdity is in the bones or it is nowhere. There is such a thing as loving someone to such depths that you have nothing to say on the subject. And, finally, poetry is as we found it. It is we who change.

Don't Think About

2008-10-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying, that there is nothing interesting in being traditional. Which is not to say that traditionalists are not drawn to interesting things.

I am a traditionalist. I am married and have a child. I am in the tenth year of a traditional career in a tradition-driven profession, working in a law office. When I write, it is in form. The form is somewhat interesting, true, when looked at from a certain angle, but a form is a form. When I paint, it is (A) pencil or such on paper, or (B) paint on burlap. Using burlap - like writing in my box form - is somewhat interesting as a choice, but I am no engine of the interesting.

I am a traditionalist by choice, in that I believe generally in something called "classical precepts," and always have, and have studied and worked and made decisions and choices accordingly, and here I am. To my mind, "classical precepts" translates to there being a right way to do any given thing, that economy and efficiency are positive values, that art is contributory rather than digressive, and that the artist/author should claim moral responsibility for his or her work. None of these ideas are interesting - not in the slightest. But there they are, swirling around me. They guide me, even as I have learned they do not and should not ever have to guide others. They are not values that guide the world or control the "quality of art" - whatever that is. They are my guides. I fought hard to obtain them, to master (or should I say, allow myself to be mastered by) them, and now they are mine, and I am theirs, assuring in myself a measure of consistency, I suppose, and a healthy dose of predictability.

But, I do not cherish the predictable. I have become more and more fond of experimental art and experimental lives, where I see that the thought and spirit of art are made apparent and where the artist makes public his or her process. The most interesting choice in experimentalism is to be an experimentalist, whereas there can be nothing interesting in choosing to be a traditionalist. And as to these sorts of roles being beyond our control - well, I have already stated that I believe in one taking responsibility for one's work, etc., so you can see that I have disqualified myself from considering options.

It strikes me that a traditionalist who has come to the decision not to apply his standards to others risks being boring to himself. I mean, what is the point of being traditional if I cannot feel in some way superior to others? But I do not feel superior. Not a bit. I see my work and am glad for it. I see my life and am grateful for it, and I can describe it in varying aspects, but I do not cherish my life or work as a thing superior to any other thing. I have known anger and I have known joy. A traditionalist, as a person, is a means of doing any particular thing in a particular way, whether that be writing a poem or leading a life. I don't know that cultural diversity will ever dilute traditionalism to the point of making all choices individual and unique. Such a movement , or occurrence, is interesting to contemplate though.

Dreamland

2008-09-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

I think I do a reasonable job of being honest with myself. I see what I do. I know why I do it. I admit my errors. I offer apologies. I have a reasonable sense of my own mortality.

There is a particular arena of life though that appears to be outside of my control. That arena is constituted of my tendency to dwell in my beliefs as if they were reality. In politics, poetry, romance (before I was married), I have always been capable of dwelling in the belief of a thing when that thing does not in fact exist. Take for example the current elections. Once I believed that Barack Obama would win the presidency, I began from that moment to dwell in that belief as an accomplished act. I am then vulnerable to absolute shock if the world's reality does not or tends not to conform to my belief. You can imagine the spiritual chaos I experienced during my dating decades. My passion would perfect my relationships, even with virtual strangers. I can't imagine how I must have seemed to those girls: arrogant, oblivious, or just clueless.

Onto poetry writing, where this tendency (which we have not put a name to) comes into full flower. I can see that I often - most often - sense having completed a poem before I even finish the first line. Something in the original thought or my mood prompts this tendency, this projective habitude, which I am compelled to sustain and fulfill. No wonder then that I often write quickly, once I get going, so as to close the gulf threatening my pre-obtained sense of composure. No wonder, again, that I write in the forms I choose: a box for filing up, or a series of boxes, each discrete, in a row, topped off just so.

Perhaps this mentality (projective habitude, did I say?) is agricultural in origin. There is surely no harm in a farmer expecting plants from the seeds she holds in her hands. It would be unreasonable not to expect a tomato from a tomato seed. Even so, there is peril in projection, and any farmer risks looking like a fool if his plans are upended, whether by some act of nature and/or his own poor planning. There is glory and dismay, I think, in a farmer's life.

On the other side of the human coin is the hunter mentality, which stalks toward an open horizon. For the hunter, belief is constituted only at the point of obtainment. Theirs would be an ordinal habitude. Hunters, I think, would make better writers, overall, though somewhat predictable. A hunter would be more likely to ask questions and more content with open results, and thus less likely to obtain unlikely results. Hunters, as a rule, are less excitable than farmers.

One more archaic type: the shepherd. I take the shepherd's constitutive habitude to partake of the farmer's and the hunter's both. A shepherd should and must expect that sheep will arise from sheep, while flock maintenance is an open-ended activity. Thus the well-worn classical trope of the shepherd leaning against a tree, gazing out at his flock and beyond, from out of his projective anxieties to open references of cities and plains. The shepherd's dilemma is how to choose between the one and the other, whether to dwell in the collective anxieties of his tribe or strike a clean path toward some solitary goal. It should come as no surprise that shepherds prefer music to words.

Human constructions aside, my point is that self-knowledge is not the work of the moment except insofar as one is explaining oneself to oneself and others, as I do here. In knowing myself I have cleared a passage to the work to be done. In making myself known, I have shared a terminology and a limitation. Both terminologies and limitations are forms of further encouragement, after all.

This is not my job

2008-09-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

If this were my job, I would make sure not to make a mistake. As it is, I expect to make mistakes, because I am unconcerned whether I am right or wrong. I do not seek agreement or correctness. I seek satisfaction and completeness. This is my art, not my job. That I call what I produce my work is not to confuse my art with my job. All is work.

As I think about my art, I have very small thoughts. Perhaps this is because my art is small. That's okay as long as my art obtains satisfaction and completeness for myself. I could not judge it otherwise, and I would as unwisely rue shortness of breath as the limited breadth of my art. No, I have small thoughts about my art because the thoughts are small, utilitarian thoughts. What will I write. What have I written. Is this a manuscript. Am I satisfied. Those thoughts - that is, those four thoughts. Usually, just the first of the four: What will I write. Having written, I ask myself Am I satisfied. The other thoughts - What have I written and Is this a manuscript - are posed infrequently, like one-armed mannequins, occurring only when I have written some substantial number of poems and am feeling like a collection or manuscript is coming into focus.

As infrequent as are my thoughts about myself, they are if anything less frequent about others. I except others' work blindly and without regard to any one critical framework except to react strongly if the work appears either wonderful or deplorable. I often see wonderful work and am glad to tell the author what I think, but I have so little else to say that I am sometimes embarrassed I said anything at all. I rarely see deplorable work. Often, the work is sad, and there is nothing I can say to sad work.

I can make up for my lack of thought in saying I am in a more or less constant state of preparedness to write. So the question What will I write is really only an exposition of the ever present consciousness that I will write and am readying myself to write. I have nothing new to say on this point, how a writer goes about his or her day, occasionally testing the mind for words that will set new work into motion.

I think I have explained how this is not my job, and that I do not go about it like a job. Perhaps if I treated writing like a job I would write better poems. I wouldn't care if I did, though. I think I would lose some other present thing if I were to impress jobliness on what I do. If anything, I dream toward less efficiency, less coherence, more presence. To be the work, the poem. To disappear.

Surprise, me

2008-09-10T05:26:00.000-07:00

A friend, schooled in experimental poetics, wonders at having written a narrative poem, when of course all poetry is a narrative of the poet having chosen to write this or that particular poem, regardless of style. There is nothing to wonder at in conflating, abridging categories. Categories such as experimental, narrative, are not controlling factors. There is nothing in a category to prevent one from anything. No one suggests that what you know will control what you do next.

If I am undiscovered that is because I have not let myself be uncovered. The risks I take - and I must be at capacity to take those risks, for they require effort - are what uncover me to myself. Then I write. Then I can say what I have written, but I will never know what I might write next, nor do I want to know.

All this sounds cool and confident. Writing in form however I am faced with knowing to a certain degree what I will write next, and so the task of writing is complicated in that I must freshen the form while surprising myself. I tend therefore to write in arcs. I have some basic set of controlling impressions in mind, which will to a greater or lesser degree guide what comes out of me. This mode of writing produces manuscripts from ten to thirty ages long, which I title, then put to the side. I now publish those manuscripts as books, which activity should pretty much encapsulate my efforts to make myself known.

But, again, even as I publish, and therefore ostensibly uncover myself to others, I become more known to myself and less capable of surprising myself, or uncovering myself to myself. Well, I suppose that much of my life is given over now to fulfillment rather than surprise. I think there is a twist in all this which I have not yet uncovered. All it takes is one surprise to set the record straight.

Apparent, Obtainable

2008-08-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

What is the revolution, but obtainability? What is the end of oppression, but apparency? What does experiment seek, but openness?

How do we expect to escape with novel words, while our actions are predictable? What is new in talking our way around the reality of our predicaments? The world conspires to give you birth, to sustain you. You are confessed in being. Acknowledging your confession will not surprise or impress anyone. We are all confessed.

I am confessed, and I will not deny your being. You are confessed, but you withhold yourself in what you believe. Your being and what you believe are all a part to be confessed.

This is all a passion. My passion, to place myself in the open, or be confessed in being. I do not see any one idea as being truthful while apparency is a truthfulness I admire.

What is it to be apparent? It is not as easy as it looks, and it does not make things simpler. To be apparent is to be unguarded. To uncover oneself. For all our work in uncovering others, we should uncover ourselves. That would be revolutionary. But as it is, you will not make yourself apparent while you fear others in the room are unconfessed. And yet, as writers, shouldn't we lead the way in apparency?

The politicization of wrting has made for politically minded writers. Even the poets are guarded and do not confess themselves. Who then will do what poets are unwilling to do?

It must be a terrible truth, seeking to say, I am, for poets to guard themselves from it. I must be lucky, having fallen away from the flow of poetic currency. And my wife, Endi, who could teach a world to listen to itself.

And so form, and so pubishing, and so a career, and family, and this and that. We will go camping today. Words for other words for what we might do tomorrow, or struggle to recall from years ago. And how long will I know my own thoughts? This is the time to say, I seek to be apparent and obtainable, and am confessed and explained in my desires.

Published & Happy in Lulu

2008-08-19T06:35:00.000-07:00

I have found my ideal means for self-expression: Lulu. I am publishing my manuscripts through Lulu.com, a print-on-demand publishing service.

I have been frustrated for years with the look and feel and effect and overall bloodless task of publishing through magazines. I tolerated one bout of sending a manuscript out to contests. The very process of assembling a traditional book-length manuscript was one of the most exasperating, maddening tasks I ever set myself.

The background here is this: I work in a concrete formalist form; I compose in manuscripts of anywhere between several poems (15 pages or so) up to 40 pages. Composing in manuscript fashion allows me to work through a theme - I guess that's the best single word - then to move on.

I had reached a point in my life where I had 13 manuscripts, largely unpublished, except for a poem here, a poem there. Not that publishing made me feel any better about myself. I had no connection to the magazines or to the people who edited them. Then, last year, I simply stopped writing. I had no outlet for the work. I had betrayed my composing process by assembling an 80-page book-length manuscript for contest purposes. My frustration expressed itself through bouts of anger that threatened my marriage.

And, so, I resorted to the internet. I bought a decent computer and clued into MySpace and FaceBook, and I discovered Lulu.com. Even with my back firmly set against the wall, it took some time to work up the nerve to self-publish. Ultimately, once I was able to envision the look and feel of the books, which would include my drawing on the cover, and once I began to feel something like a trickle of genuine excitement, I let myself go.

I expect to publish 13 to 14 titles over the next few months. Most titles will be perfect bound, available through Amazon.com, etc., I believe, besides through my Lulu Storefront. The bottom line is, my work will be available to whomever wants it. That really is all I have ever wanted out of poetry, to be obtainable. I don't need to teach. I don't need to make a living through this stuff. I just want the poems out there. That's it.

Oh - my current mood? I am more relaxed than I have been perhaps forever. I am writing again, in a manuscript titled Deserts & Streams. There is a lot of work to do, but I can do it, and for me, that is a joy and a freedom.

Take a Day Off!

2008-08-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

I wonder about form and the battle for form against formlessness and other forms. I wonder about waking to a form, living with that form, stretching it, testing it, putting it to bed.

I wonder about the people I know and the ones I don’t, and how much I will ever know about them, whether that knowledge will deepen, and what they might know about me, and why it is that we put so much time into form or formlessness. And why that strikes me as sad sometimes, as necessary at others, and why life can be such a struggle and make such terrific sense at one and the same time.

Then I wonder what to do next, or I sleep, and my dreams are often of some use to me in clearing my conscious self so that I can work.

I am sensible
in time again
on time here,
where I sense
this black on
white, and in
places in our
places how we
stand and sit
& bleed white

Some Feeling for a Form

2008-07-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

The formal grounds for how one writes are one thing, the emotional grounds another. To write about concrete formalism using technical, hierarchical terminology – to speak in building blocks – negates the facts and effect of the experience that put those blocks in motion. It would be like constructing the shell of a train, pistons and all, but neglecting to provide a boiler. I have come far enough to say that I write in the block form to work with and against form. That it provides me with a non-enculturated structure with which I can do as I please. But there is more to say, more that means more than speaking of the “influence” of double-acrostics, etc. What means more is what feelings drive the choices or choice seeking as a poet, and to seek the cause of those feelings. Then I will have built something like a functional platform for understanding my own work.

I write in the block form for the same reason any poet writes in the form they write in – it brings me alive. The block form forces decisions for word choice and arrangement. It challenges me. What makes me write poetry is that the effect of a block form poem is the effect I want to see in my poetry. That effect is at the edges of the lines, at the beginnings and ends, in a constant flux between terminal endings and elision. A secondary battle is in use of punctuation versus use of line endings, strophe endings, and word phrasing as punctuation either instead of punctuation marks, or with punctuation marks.

This sounds technical, but the point I want to lead to is how the block form poems are realized at their boundaries, at the edges of the poem. Once I realized this condition of the poems, I realized that I am drawn to work – writing, painting, music – that exists at various boundaries or edges of experience. I myself, through nature or course of habit, tend to live at the edge of my life, on balance, losing balance, recapturing it. Testing those boundaries, again and again.

An attitude, a philosophy, a personality, informs a choice of form. This cannot be news. But it is news to me to make this connection which explains why I developed this form to suit my personality. I had thought I would have more to say on this topic, but I believe I have said all I need to. Certainly, the reader does not need a list of the “edgy” works I am drawn to, nor proof of my own edgy personality. I can point your way to any number of friends who will attest to that! The point of this writing is to explain an idea (the emotional behind the form choice) as it applies to Concrete Formalism. There is more to be said I believe on why authors are so willing to ascribe influence while shy to name motive. I will address that topic another time.

Something into night

2008-07-20T17:13:00.000-07:00

It is remarkable how little thought is in a book. The evidence of thought, yes, but thought itself is absent. I say this having recently finished a few so-called great books which left me thought-bereft. I see from this point that reading is not thinking, if by thinking we hope for fresh thought. Looking back, I recall being prompted by books, but those prompts were more properly self-contained goads occasioned by the achievement of the books themselves. The promptings were mine, not the books’.

As I read now I find myself having read, not having thoughts. As I finish a book, I reach for another book. I do not reach for the pen or computer. My lovely laptop computer, buffeted by cigarette smoke and the strains of Motorhead, I am told, as I write from a favorite bar, having dislocated myself from any context that might prevent me from saying what I think instead of what I hope from myself.

For the guilt is mine in asking books to do my work for me. And it is my fault in seeking to explain myself and my poetry, instead of writing, and allowing the writing to explain itself. I am going to suggest an analogy here to Apollinaire, who it seems to me accomplished a great deal without having explained a damn thing. And now I will leave the suggestion behind as I move on. Bon chance, analogy.

I cannot explain my writing as if to fill an empty or emptying cup. I cannot simply draw lines and call it art. Specifically, I have granted myself a label – Concrete Formalist poet- and having done so, I have not written a poem. I have written well of concrete formalism, but now find I have nothing to say that would add to the subject or fill in the gaps, or sustain the sentiments of explanation and support.

What do I say, now, buffeting my lovely laptop with cigarette smoke. I say I write in form not to justify form, but to fuck with form. I created a structure divorced from obvious cultural models which I can erect and challenge by turns. What is it to experiment – to think – but to redesign, abolish, and create. Every move can be explained, but the moves in themselves need no explanation, except to say: here is thought. To do as I do is to think, not to remember what I did. A book is the memory of thought.

But what is a bar? Well, I can say this is a lovely bar. Dark and smoky, where the bartenders put on the music, which tends toward the loud, profane, and authentic sort of rock that would seem divorced from thoughts of books. Should I write about that? No, but I can write in it.

Where I am is hell, there is no other, writes Robert Lowell in Skunk Hour – and where I am is heaven, if by heaven we mean thought in life and not as difference from non-thought. If by thinking you retreat you will build where you come to rest, if you rest, if you escape. But I wonder who escapes, or do we customarily choose to believe that life is thought in the truth of obligations, and life is hell in the fact of failure. Do we embrace thought as surely we believe we do, or do we embrace death, which is the absence of thought in all its forms.

If by thinking you advance – well, how will you know, except that you continue to run as one uncaught. The dead cannot think or extol thought. They extol books. Their thoughts are patterns aligned with patterns derived from books sponsored by authors who may have had thoughts. It is impossible to say what is life and death without having lived and died and lived to tell.

At this moment, thought is alive. It needs no further explanation. What will you wait for, to live again. To think.

My challenge then – to return the focus directly to myself – is to think alive in poetry and in writing about my poetry. Happily, I cannot be tempted to write in any other way, as I do not now read theory and do not make my living reading or teaching books. Either I think and write or I do nothing. I play solitaire. I attend to my obligations and I play solitaire, waiting, wondering what the fuck is wrong with me.

Now, having written all this, you might think I suppose I have hit upon a Formula for Life. But no, I will rest at some point and be overtaken, then run again. Having reached one point of understanding there is no law that demands I must by necessity continue in understanding. It takes a great deal of energy to reach an understanding. It is easier, much easier, to live in the words of others and mirror or parallel the understandings achieved by others. Either is the same thing, to mirror or parallel is to react in relation to the dead. There is no thought in an eclipse.
But I have found, much to my dismay and disgust, that others’ understandings, while prompting in me a desire to do the same, have in themselves provided no real support to explain my writings to myself or others. And explaining is something I must do as there is no one else to explain what I do. And, given the fundamental principle that art matters, what I do matters, as the poems are good poems and I am their only representative.

The form of explanation should be (now I’m guessing) suggestive rather than argumentative. Again, I do not want to contend with the dead on our shelves or the dead that read books and report on them to the near dead who study them. One problem of course is that suggestions imply openness or a seeking for response (which is fine) whereas I receive few if any responses to my suggestions. I can suggest, but I cannot rely on response. I cannot force the horse of response to the trough of suggestiveness. I cannot pick the grape of suggestiveness and hope for the wine of response. Or, I can hope – or do more than that: I can have …faith? But I cannot rely on the proof of response.

Faith tied, however, to human feelings, is a contract this poet is not entirely comfortable with. This is a war of words though and I must use what arms suggest themselves and are available. First rule is: what are my models. Well, my own experience (as I allude to above) is one where I imagined promptings by books that were more properly my own. So, I can say I have faith in my suggestions but do not delude myself. A reader’s response is their own prompting from within, whatever the name on whatever the book that occasioned that prompting.

So, we are clear on that point, yes? Whatever promptings you, the reader, might experience – and which I am dedicated to provide in my poetry and explanations of my poetry – are your own. These words are an arrangement in what we share and obtain in what we share. The analogy is in music, where the song claims for itself nothing new in the notes assembled to the purpose of song-making.

Let me return briefly to the books I have been reading.

The books are largely a return to books I read long ago. This effort was based on the desire to capture the promptings that sponsored my poetry. I can see that this was a failed effort. I have lived truthfully these years: written, married, worked, had a child, read, written, loved and been loved. All this is to the purpose of thought in the present, which cannot be recaptured by visiting the past. How odd, and encouraging, that I did not miss anything of importance in what I read when I was 22 years old, but took the promptings fully and acted upon them then, and now find nothing new in what I read, either of what I read when I was 22, or in what I read at 49. Without knowing it, all this life and this work has been all my own and is not supportable by others’ words. Where I am is, by occasion, hell – in that I am alone in my thoughts, and heaven, in that I believe in my thoughts. I cannot be undeceived, except by some authority that would disallow or contextualize thought. I neatly avoided a University life, preserving myself from contextualization, and I believe in God, who I trust disallows nothing that is proper to any effort to negotiate this narrow, human space. Safe in God, I am secure in myself – for the moment! There is a lot of work to do before I realize and can see and point to any sort of redeeming evidence aside from these suggestions and explanations, however complete they are in themselves.

Thank you for reading.

Check

2008-07-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

I don't expect to float any ideas today but I do need to reassemble my thoughts, and so something might happen.

I favor FaceBook over MySpace, clearly. I have a passel of friends through FaceBook, who I am interested in and who have included themselves in the Concrete Formalist Poetry group. That group is certainly my focal point. I have put aside cycling (racing) and other distractions and compensations. I am excited for whatever developments might occur. I have not felt this engaged and hopeful in many years.

The question I ask myself at this point is whether to cut things loose (such as cycling, MySpace) or simply let them sit unattended. My tendency is to cut things loose that do not pertain to a central project, but that habit has cost me in some ways. In this instance, I can't be sure I won't want to race and I can't be sure I won't revisit MySpace.

Here's a thought: I can cut away habits and things, but not people. So for instance I can eliminate racing but stay with my team; I can reformat MySpace to be a placeholder, a referrant to this blog or FaceBook. Rather than eliminate, I can reorganize.

As to my poetry, I am closer to writng than I was a week ago. I feel like the Concrete Formalist Poetry needs a little more attention to bring it to a point where it prompts choices for my manuscripts, which in turn would provide impetus to write. Likely. Reading and reviewing books in FaceBook is an important activity to, as I reinvigorate my mind and lay down some history for myself.

Writing this has helped, at least to reassure me I am not missing anything. Back to the pulse.

Keeping an Eye On - from MySpace

2008-07-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

I must say, this business of reading and thinking and writing is risky, and filled with potential for missteps. Just this morning I found myself in some difficulty, thinking about posting on the subject of Barthes' Mythologies, then choosing not to do so because it would be perceived as arrogant to purportedly "review" a half-century old influential book. Now, how did I let myself get into a position of being concerned about how I am perceived on MySpace, FaceBook, or in my blogs? Well, perhaps it is because I am happy here, and fear offending someone, or losing "friends," etc. More background: I thought last night of creating a Group in FaceBook, along the lines of, "Iowa Writers' Workshop Grads are Super-Compensatory, Ego-Driven Nut Jobs - I should Know, because I am One." And then I thought to hold back, fearing I would offend someone. At the same time, I was resolved to invite as friends anyone who joined the MySpace Group I formed, Working Poets. There are certainly some interesting and divergent people who have joined that Group. But this morning, I hesitated posting those invitations. To crown my morning of doubt, I joined the Group National Poetry Foundation. Now what the hell am I doing joining the National Poetry Foundation, you ask? Well, others I know have joined it, and it does appear..."interesting."

There's that word again: "interesting." I should know better. Where something appears "interesting" and naught else, I should run like the wind.

The end result of all these mystifications and circumlocutions is I was sitting here feeling quite down, having talked myself out of doing everything I wanted to do, playing solitaire, when I should have been happily pecking away at the keyboard - for what had happened since my happiness of yesterday, except that I had second-guessed myself? Maybe the problem started with joining the Barack Obama fan club. I mean to suggest that I need to stay on top of job number one: the poetry, Concrete Formalism, and all that jazz.

So let me get to it: the Group creation, the invitations, and thinking about what positively matters to me, rather then worrying about what might matter to someone else.

Not Reading for Thought - from MySpace

2008-07-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

I have found a line of thought. When the thoughts coalesce, I write a poem, or a blog entry here, or on one of the Groups to which I belong in MySpace or FaceBook. I find that this line of thought is not informed by reading, except to the extent that reading is pleasant and necessary to me, as is cycling, work, walks around the neighborhood, etc. I have never felt as close to my work as now that I have put reading in perspective. And poetry. Poetry, which, if I do not write it, it will not be written.

What is my line of thought? My background, as I express it today, is that my point of view is as the author of a collection of poems of a characeristic form and content. I then turn my attention to the world around me, seeking to place myself and my poetry in that world. My line of thought then is this: I am determining as I write and as I chose how to interact with what I see in the world, therefore, my responsibility is to reveal those determinations. So, I try and make audible my will and my perspective. So, you can see now why it is important that I place reading in perspective, as I write from will, from desire. Losing that focus, and it is tenuous, I lose everything. I cannot merely think and call it living, or writing, for that matter.

Redirect

2008-06-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

This blog has existed for the sole purpose of directing you to my page on MySpace, where, besides promoting my brilliant ideas and showing off my stunning poems, I had fun.

However, I may be reorganizing, home-basing at FaceBook, blogging here, doing a little POD action.

For now, for thoughts, go to myspace.com/hartiganhartigan.