At the fair, pushing

I think the goal was to completely stop writing about poetry here, but that hasn't quite happened yet. The goal of sitting down now to write was to write about the goal of what I've been writing. But I don't think I care. Why post these writings on a blog rather than keep them filed away in a folder on my hard drive? There're a few points I could argue. But why? My kids, I hope, will need no argument.
      —•—
At the fair, pushing Dash in his stroller, I stop at the end of one of the tents. An empty spot. KC and Vaughn somewhere behind me, standing in a line for soft-serve ice cream. I'm looking out at the swarm of people, bodies in T-shirts and shorts, nauseating expressions of their excited faces as they talk and walk to the tractor pull or the sheep tent or the exit. I hate 'em all. I'm that good of a person. Are there really people who believe you can write poems for everybody? Or maybe that's a strawman that gets thrown around? When poets write on their blogs about populist versus elitist poetry what exactly's implied? Staring out into the crowds, I suppose writing for anybody's a nice sentiment. In a certain slant of light I can get behind that. But what kind of writing's that? "Writing." I've had enough with my precious distinctions between "writing" and "making," which smells of that animal smell that swabbed my nose when we were passing through the ticket booth. Is all hate born of self-hate or just some of it? KC and Vaughn return with their soft serves. At least today there won't be any damn jets flying overhead like they sometimes have done at New Milford's big gatherings on the green. Hate's the second most useful emotion. The danger's that it must be applied discriminately.

Untitled

To write so much
and complete so little
 

Thoughts rise like gas

Thoughts rise like gas as I sit on the can. White walls dull as the technical faculty, or facility I guess, of a poet. Who couldn't take quickly to the counting, and variation, of feet? How many years wasted before the epiphany of full-bodied beat? Could be a lifetime, this lifeline, or you could get away without it. Spring and all, against the grain. As if any work could be without it. To mind the line but not to toe it. The line is a plank but it's not. The poem is not a pirate ship, but it is, as it sails with its stolen cargo below deck, sails ever under the sign of skull and crossbones. The lines, canons. Galleys charged with forgetfulness. Samples composed of dummy text . . .

This is a line. This is a line
break. This is a line. This
is a line break. This is a line. This is a line break.
 

Dirty Yellow Chair

"Dirty Yellow Chair" is a song I was going to write. It was going to be full of sounds like shallow water and charity dollars. Change, you know. The lawnmower next door turns off. Vaughn says hi from our front porch, my stomach feels groggy, someone says hi back to her. Man or woman I can't tell. I hear things from the back room. I hear things not so well. The AC whirs. We destroy the planet. I stand up, turn off the light; it's not needed at 3:45. Pull the string. I was going to write down lines like "Sitting in her cute yellow chair / the chair doesn't tell me who she is" and "Leaning back into the face of the electric drops / her words doesn't tell me who she is / She's the dirty little angel I'm strapped to / her face like a triangle and her fingernails." It's found language. It's not me but it is. I can't decide if I want it so I don't write it down. Until now that I'm typing what has been happening. I fall into it like an accident. That has as much meaning.

Like surfing the Web

Writing, like surfing the Web. You're reading a webpage and notice a link, in a sidebar, say, and you think you'll click on it when you finish what you're reading. But what you were reading has led to a different link. You click on that one, read that webpage, and click a link there to some other site, etc., until you end up someplace very different from that first link you noticed when your surfing started. But that link not followed is as much a part of your reading as the links followed. What's the difference between a link not taken and a link taken but mostly forgotten? The browser history won't show the link not taken, but it's in you, like a little black rock. Shakes loose and gets stuck in an interior nook of you, like a bit of dirt in your shoe. And so writing the writer is struck by an idea, or image, or series of words. An angle, a slant, a take. A nuance. Phrase mentally noted but not set down. Not yet. Not yet. Till not yet becomes never. But it's always there. Even if it's eventually forgotten on the surface. There in the authorial mind at least. A parenthetical of the unconscious mind. Less parenthetical (like this) than parenthetical like this.

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
 

Alien Vowels

"Words are what stick to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to." — Jack Spicer, After Lorca

Picked up a copy of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer last weekend. Nearly jumped out of my kicks when I found it misshelved with the "new" used fiction and marked for four dollars. Nearly a week later and I'm still wondering how the hell I went so long (at least five years) between reads. It also got me realizing I hadn't been writing much else since starting this blog. Thought I would have to change that, went to sleep and woke up with two or three projects in mind. Worked on the first, rather small one (ten poem series) Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Time to let it sit for a while and see what it amounts to. Hope to start on the second project this weekend. It wil be longer. Book length. Which isn't promising for me. Most of the longer projects I start end less-than-half finished, abandoned due to some sudden change of aestheitc or whatever. But, in the beginning, the field is open, waiting for crop circles like alien vowles, waiting for trim marks, registration on the page.