Categories
Ars Poetica Footnotes Why

Making of Americans

…I write for myself and strangers.

Mostly everyone dislikes to hear it. I love it and I write it. Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that every one is of a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying of them, always I am seeing their repeating. More and more I love it of them, the being in them, the mixing in them, the repeating in them, the deciding the kind of them every one is who has human being.

From the Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein

It is my underlying interest in musical meter and repetition and the idea that repetition brings with it a primal sense of comfort in our brains that has taken hold in my current writing. It is the spiral that binds us to the galaxy destined to return over and over again but never to the same place you started repeating your ritual your habit day after day sunset after sunrise your repetition creating your human being.

Categories
Garden Psalms

Zinnia

Zinnias
illuminated
near-
neon
incendiary
accents

Categories
Ars Poetica Footnotes

Twice

You can write the same poem more than once.

Categories
American Place Ars Poetica Garden Psalms

It speaks to you

I went to buy a book of poems
Hearts, identities, wants, failures
Scattered across pages, books, shelves of books, shelves of
poetic thrashings

Awaking from the same bad dream, writing the same bad poetry
that releases your free will to subjugation and lies
dormant in the pithy pulp, poet after poet
screaming unto no one, until

“I’ll take this one”

Categories
Ars Philosophica Ars Poetica Footnotes

Hubris

I don’t care what you think the meaning of your own work may be. The listener will be moved by their own experience or you aren’t doing a very good job as a poet. This is not to say that you should not know what your own work means (to you). Don’t expect the same from the user.

Categories
2019 American Place Garden Psalms Poems

Barber Shop Blind

Lenses down
Sight bubbles
Faceless forms
Busy cutting
Head vibrates
Blur tremors
Walls reflect
What I cannot see

Busy people
“Looking good”
Cell stacks
Aged clippings
Fall slowly
Swept away
Cheerful chatter
Finishing with a new me

Categories
Ars Philosophica Ars Poetica Footnotes

A Philosophical Question

If a poem sits on the shelf and no one reads it, is it poetry?

Categories
Garden Psalms

Words

Poems

Broken

Syntax

Exploring

Broken

Feelings

Categories
Ars Poetica Footnotes Why

A New Ink for the page – Paterson

I suppose I should start with why I picked up my pen again. Or in this case a Pentel p207 and a keyboard. Jim Jarmusch recently did the film Paterson (2016) with Adam Driver. Unremembered by me before watching the film, I had studied William Carlos William’s “Paterson” in college. I didn’t recall that my last college course was Modern American Poetry, probably because I had fixated on the lyricist as the modern poet. (I had started my band LedgeWalker while starting Grad School. The band won at the time.) But, the learning remained, germinating a new poesy. “Must remember to write it down.” JMK

I love the idea that the poet is a poem; is a scribe of events. MindScribe.

“Paterson is a long poem in four parts–that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody–if imaginatively conceived–any city, all the details of which may be to voice his most intimate convictions.”

The people around the writer. The city that triggers the thought that pays attention to its own surroundings and then reflects it back in a cascade of visual words. To paint the city with a man on a bench contemplating his beautiful place in this beautiful place and writing it all down.

Categories
2013 Poems Road Less Travelled

I’ll Catch Up To You There

For Granny

The sun is always
shining on The Road.

It’s the place I go
to be with them,
my ancestors,
my fellows, my friends.

It is where I walk
quietly, alone
Thinking of days past
and lives well lived.

There’s no time
Out on The Road
Out of the hustle and
Bustle of everyday lives,
Just the place
where I keep walking,
talking with the
Ones I Love.

 

Elizabeth Sutherlin, March 7, 1917 – October 1, 2013