Why Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Stephen Sutherlin

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.

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.