My early poems were childish.
Then again I was a child.
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I was a child
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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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Zinnia
Zinnias
illuminated
near-
neon
incendiary
accents
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Twice
You can write the same poem more than once.
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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”
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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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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
If a poem sits on the shelf and no one reads it, is it poetry?
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Words
Poems
Broken
Syntax
Exploring
Broken
Feelings
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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.