Category: Footnotes

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Ars Philosophica Ars Poetica Footnotes Hearts Quartet Why

Many words for love

My father used to preach a sermon every year about Love. From an early age, I understood that love (like myriad words for ICE in Inuit) has many words and many subtle meanings. The sermon covered and explored the Greek words, plural, for love. Eros – Erotic, sexual love. Philos – Friendship, brotherly love. Agape – Self-sacrificial love. His conclusion was that Christ became the ultimate expression of Human Love by sacrificing his Human Being. The love of a parent to a child, believer and God.

I have added Psychí. Psyche, wife to Eros and goddess of the Soul. My granny used to say that her and my papaw believed they had a psychic connection and that they would try to see if they could connect their thoughts while he was away at work. Building on this idea, I am exploring a transcendental love of the married. Beyond finishing each other’s sentences, life-long couples can explore and develop a quantum entanglement that is connected beyond the other forms of love. This life energy that the two share leads to wordless exchanges and un-spoken understandings.

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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.

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Ars Poetica Footnotes

Twice

You can write the same poem more than once.

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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.

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Ars Philosophica Ars Poetica Footnotes

A Philosophical Question

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

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Ars Poetica Footnotes Why

A New Ink for the page – Paterson

Paterson, NJ - Great Falls
The local is the only universal, upon that all art builds.

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.