preconditions

hey mark, do you or would read the london review of books, if you were given a subscription? details on why i ask at your request.

in medias res, yes. i get lectured a lot on putting things where they don't belong (such as myself on manhunt, by fellow hunters; a pic of a mouse on manhunt, by the site operators; or my body distance running through the snow at 1am, by campus police). no, i'm not xtreme (sic), just a little sick, in a way i enjoy: estranged from the usual patterns but interested in others.

i'm trying to be cute, i guess, even though i'm told cuteness in poetry is the fastest way to annoy everyone who matters and get left behind in the slush pile of the age. so that worries me, but i find other thoughts to shake it off: generally i'm not cute in poems; i have fun in poems, with a spare, abstract, parmenidean farce that isn't afraid, additionally, to be true. anyway, most poets officially endorse the dictum 'autobiography rots' (i've mentioned this, but hear me out) and yet many write journal entries with line breaks (not my turn of phrase, but a good one): one more reason to believe we fool ourselves. and because we fool ourselves, we should try not to fool ourselves, but not to the neglect of more pressing matters of writing, such as having something to say about life, language and everything in between, and such as having a social pulse and agenda even, and such as believing maybe 'insight' and 'message' were perhaps thrown into modern poetry's hume's fire a little too hastily.

which brings me to a lesson i've learned (contra dean young: lessons are not barometers of simplemindedness), one of the better ones a poet can learn: you don't matter. your norse gods and love of baroque architecture or music, your fascination with the promiscuity of language or brazilian clubkids, none of it matters. i don't want to read about it, either. and only those who dig you for other reasons, or are using your poems as cutting-edge therapy by some well-meaning therapist, are going to give it more than a passing thought, should they have the good fortune to chance across it. ok, so what? make what you write matter: if it doesn't matter to you, if you are only channeling it to get rid of it or to have fun with it (since you're stuck in your life with your interests), i don't want it. but if you do make it matter: if i feel you're a real person showing me something, not hiding the fact that you have nothing to hide (or show); if you have something to say, 'across however wild or thin a thread' (mary oliver), that makes all the difference. your obscurity and difficulty is then not earned (you can't earn it), but enabled, even ennobled. huh? your obscurity is par for the course on a course of purple ricegrass on twin earth, if you have your twinpack of curiosity and courage packed.