any-angled light

Prefacial Premonition

2009-07-31T05:06:00.009-04:00

So maybe you’re thinking, Of course. Who else but a poet would write a book on labyrinths? Who else but a poet—an exile in industrialized, computerized society; a lover of embers and leftover spiritual ash; a quixotic pilgrim walking in circles of descriptions of a bandaged, bitternail, but beautiful world—would write a book on labyrinths?

But all warm-up and welcome aside, I labor in what follows to rub the smug of over-personality out of these musings on labyrinths, labyrinths that helped me do just that. Escape myself—my usual way of walking (in lines, toward goals), my usual way of being present to the world (as an observer, always only on the way to being a participant), my usual assumptions about other pedestrians (in the way, but polite enough, often enough), my usual thoughts about scripted rituals (atavistic time-sucks), and my usual need to solve—or at least argue with, or at least document—each part of the world as a piece of the puzzle.

In the labyrinths I walked in churches and garden grounds across these North American states, I found to my surprise a most precious of intangible renewables: surprise. The relief, the release, and the simple joy of surprise. Wound in their tangled knots of nested space and time one puts in them, the labyrinths I walked were intricate and clever in their surprises. But just as surprising were the personalities who came to walk them, for reasons equally tangled. The labyrinths were us—wishing to simplify the byzantine buzz of our minds; wishing to ramify any love and truth we could detect, or invent, or remember, in our former and current selves. Wishing to simplify; wishing to ramify, in some aspirational alchemy I was in the end gratefully unable to canonize into a science.

Some Favorite Snippets

2008-12-22T02:18:00.001-05:00

A belief in happiness bred
despair, though despair could be assuaged
by belief, which required faith,
which made those who had it
one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.

—Stephen Dunn, from Circular

It's possible that while sleeping the hand
that sows the seeds of stars
started the ancient music going again

—like a note from a great harp—
and the frail wave came to our lips
as one or two honest words.

—Antonio Machado, It's Possible

I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what's in a name
To shame the one who knows
Mud does not stain
Clay he's made of
Dust Adam became—
The dust he was—
Was he his name

—Samuel Menashe, Adam Means Earth

I apologize to coincidence for calling it necessity.
I apologize to necessity just in case I'm mistaken.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Under A Certain Little Star

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then
have to be human—and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Duino Elegies

It's what we can't
know that interests
us—the pre-Greeks
or Australopithicus—
where there are more
absences and breaks
than bits of bone
or pot. It's not
news, but it
fascinates—our
love of hints, our
mending minds that
love to patch up
other times like
plates, and how this
might extrapolate
to hearts: explaining
how here can be
too much matching part.

—Kay Ryan, Not News

One could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.

—Kay Ryan, The Pieces That Fall To Earth

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person.

—Czeslaw Milosz, from Ars Poetica?

When the lover
goes, the vow though
broken remains, that
trace of eternity love
brings down among us
stays, to give
dignity to the suffering
and to intensify it.

—Galway Kinnell, The Vow

In joy and terror
I move in time where
nothing points to error;
I move in space
where love's event,
and death's, notch
time's face.

—Josephine Jacobsen, from The Clock

Joy's trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

—Richard Wilbur, from Hamlen Brook

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Possibilities

... it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it ...

—A. R. Ammons, from Gravelly Run

A (True) Paradox

2008-12-22T02:17:00.000-05:00

There are two kinds of people: Those who divide everyone into two kinds of people, and those who don't.

To Be an HK0

2008-12-22T02:16:00.001-05:00

I was reading. Something gelled, something struck. It's funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea out there that you've come across before but never thought very much about. (It's also funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea brand new to you at the time—transfinitude, bivalent communication, an algebra that speaks equally well about knots and quanta—but this reading was not that.)

The idea was being blind. I never think about being blind and maybe I should, since I am notoriously bad (to boyfriend and optometrist alike) about sleeping with my contacts in. As I think back through the mists, it seems like I was 10 or 12 when I came to accept blind is better as my answer to the playground straw poll (/ candied, caffeinated chitchat) about whether it was better to be blind or deaf. I can't really isolate my 12-year-old intuitions; but it feels true to say that those then were mine now, as far as the blind-or-deaf question goes. Which pretty much means I haven't thought about it since. Weird.

The 12-year-old intuition, then (in a new suit of words): Love and friendship are muchly if not mostly vocal. A faceview says plenty, true, but faceviews say less than conversations (and not just trope-ically)... Little toddlings may look to faces for context and reassurance, but us older children look to the tics in the stream of voice. Or at least I do. I can watch a movie with my eyes closed—at least one of the old mise-en-scene human-paced variety—but I have trouble with my ears closed. Is this just the way movies are made now, dialogue-rich, or is this tentative evidence that human life more densely packs into sound than into sight? (If the latter, uh-oh. See my previous post, My Voice is Visual.) Upshot: I feel more cut off cut off from sound than I do from sight. Another illustration that this is true for me: When I plug my ears (unless I psych myself up for it and the scene is brief and visually rich, as when I use earplugs in a noisy dance club), I feel claustrophobic to the point of dry-drowning. But when I close my eyes all I feel is a calm, boring, eager dark.

I just experimented a bit to see if/how my intuition has changed. When I close my eyes now, fifteen years older, it feels scarier. The thought creeps in with moderate force, What if you couldn't open the lids again, at will? It would suck. (Maybe this feeling is fertilized by the knowledge that I love to see thoughts as sentences. I never hear them quite right, but often I see them just right. Also, I'm bad at visualizing hard abstract pictures—terrible topologist I'd make—so I need visual, symbolic assistance. I need to see the pictures tracked syntactico-discursively, since I usually can't see them in their naked forms. Pity, since I love nakedness. Damn my shitty visuospatial pathways. Thank God so much of math has been algebraicized.) But still it feels at least a pinch more claustrophobic to imagine a sound vacuum from here on out. Just a succession of signs and symbols, ugly pictures and pretty, faces and feces. Not good.

But let me move on to my motivation for writing this post. It's in the questions I'll try formulating as: How much of us is lodged in our senses? and the corollary/ancillary Utterly senseless, what are we? and most of all, Are our senses crucial to our identities, or crutches without which we might even be abler? I can't really answer any of these, but I'll stab at the dark with a few thoughts.

Good old Helen Keller teaches us that a sense vacuum (especially two of the main 'cognitive' senses, sight and hearing; the abstracting senses of music, math, and art) is a nightmare but that there is at least something like waking, into the calm provided by that even more abstracting, representation-providing faculty: the linguistic intellect or more simply, language. Representation (hereafter, REP) joins us to a larger world and frees us from the sticky hothouse you can simulate by touching and tasting things for an hour with a blindfold on and earplugs in. REP is so integral that it's hard to think without it. Although modernism and postmodernism try; with their words and paint splotches speaking only their own language; as wheels within wheels and no road around. It's interesting. Doesn't get you too far, though; you start hating or loving the melody, the splotches or the inward aesthetics of the words (their meaning, context, and advocacy aside), which is all good and a good source of loveable things to keep handy in your life, but still, after a while you crave meaning context and advocacy. You want the abstracted bits to open up views, to transport you to them. (Side note: Sometimes they do this without having to, just by jogging or instigating thoughts: by founding thoughts, intentionally or unintentionally.) O REP, too much of you and all we have is the world again—the world redundant, the words pleonastic—but too little and all we have is smudges of word-tokens and pigment. (Which again are sometimes lovely, but not lovely enough to keep us satisfied... not lovely enough to keep us loving the world and the fact of our being in it, or so I'd conjecture.)

Math is a weird special case. It's abstract, so much so that besides the kooky Platonists (who in flights I almost join now and then), everyone believes math isn't 'about' anything other than the structure of our formal concepts, which we lift from the empirical world but then de-empiricize before christening mathematical. Like the natural numbers. You know, 1,2,3..., those. If someone tried to verify a very large computation with say, popcorn kernels, and the instantiated kernel-calculation disagreed with the abstract one done in numerals, the numerals win. Everyone assumes something went wrong in practice; and the kicker is, some computations are with numbers oodles larger than the number of particles in the universe, and no one worries that there is no way to verify that the computation is really 'true of the universe'; and the double-kicker is, even if the world did weird shit like when you put exactly 500 kernels together in a group, one disappears, so that physically adding 500 and 500 gives 998, math would still claim that 500 + 500 = 1000. De-empiricized.

So math is lost, basically. Between being certain about what it's certain about (which it is, and should be) and not being about anything in the world; only in worlds the world inspires. (Bertrand Russell made a similar point a hundred years ago, before he came to believe—bad Wittgenstein!—that math is fully tautological and therefore fully pointless.)
So math is awesomely powerful, but philosophically tenuous.

But interesting. Math grows and thrives, cut off from the world. Maybe other cut-off things can grow and thrive? God? That's a whole 'nother story.

And something I'm keeping in mind as I'm wondering if a senseless world would make a better one (if Helen Keller, twice deprived, is defined as an HK2, then the utterly senseless are HK5s) is that without all that periodic sensory input, influx and inspiration math gets before it sets up shop in the concepts, the concepts probably wouldn't be there for us. (A philosopher might put this as No abstracta without concreta.) Or would they? HK had language abilities waiting to be activated, and boy were they once they were. What else waits with us and in us? And is some of what waits (a religious itch?) de-activated by our usual sensory overload? Is God any brighter in a blackened sky? Blank inside—for moments or hours, by choice—what choices might present themselves?

My Voice Is Visual

2008-12-22T02:15:00.007-05:00

Any reading I or anyone gives is doubly affected: contingently, with one's currently chosen way of moving through the words (I speak them how they speak to me today, like); and necessarily, with the actual one way (however the words come out) the words come out.

At one point, in the Phaedrus, Socrates argues his complaints against written words as a source of wisdom. One of those complaints is that they always say "only one and the same thing." But that has not been my experience at all. The static written words of my favorite poems say handfuls of things, some of them dozens. The ambiguity of the oracular? Yes, that is what does it, and other forms of ambiguity, which other of my other posts have touched on.

Occasions of reading aloud: Those are what always say one thing. More carefully: Occasions of reading aloud may say just as many things as the quiet page does, but they always sound as if they say one thing—and then the listener has to try to separate the affectations of the speech from the manifold meanings of the words.

At some level, it's charming. You get to hear the words spoken from and with a personality unlike your own. (Whether it's really the author's is another matter.) But I am always ready to poke at the tyranny of the "poetry is sound" crowd. Poetry is much! Poetry is many! Poetry is sound, and sound is older—but poetry is sight, and sight is bolder! (He said in rhyme, noting the irony.)

An Analytic Code

2008-12-22T02:15:00.002-05:00

Back when I was an Analytic zealot, I was taught one of their codes: Say what you mean and mean what you say. It's a well-worn penny of the tribe.

I've been daydreaming about it lately. First off, I like to break it down—'analyse' it, in the Briticism. Once in parts, say what you mean and mean what you say then have oppositional force and we can crank up the gristmill of compare-and-contrast.

Say what you mean has a nice ring of, Be straightforward (I'm rarely that, but I realize it works for some people), but it hits other notes too. Like, Out with it: Don't sit on your words; along the lines of, Don't brood: brandish your thoughts. Good advice—You might meditate for a few minutes or hours over the right way to say something, only to discover later in a chat with someone that the two of you were only synergistic seconds away from the formulation you were pining for. And then there's the idea that thoughts kept too long on their back burners before tasting dry out—It's nice to speak with heroic confidence in pitch-perfect diction, but that's what you risk in doing so. So: Issue things in drafts. (Draughts?) Think of this as culinary school.

But wait, there's more! Say what you mean is also sort of cutting, sort of soul cutting. As if to say, Don't sin by omitting (nicely in tension with Be straightforward): Say everything you're thinking, not just what you think we want to hear. Maybe something like, Don't edit too much—Say first, edit later. Or we'll edit. But in the other direction, say what you mean means, Don't beat around the bush if beating around the bush is your way of avoiding the bush, rather than your way of approaching it. Dance for the issue, not around it. And last but far from least—probably first in importance—there's the note of Don't lie to me or bullshit me, meaning or knowing one thing but saying another.

Let's switch over to mean what you say. The strongest note I hear is one of will: mean what you say (you'll do). Be faithful to your responsibilities both material and semantic: Deliver on your promises. But right there one chord away is, Mean what you say (you mean), which is what but Don't lie to me or bullshit me, again. Not to complain. Something that important bears repeating, and that cute round of redundancy has got to be one of the charms/conceits that makes the code so attractive (to us exacting types) in the first place.

But wait, there's more, again! Mean what you say sets up a head-to-head tension with say what you mean: Meaning what is said implies something like owning or standing behind what is said, and that implies something like caution. Pause. Nearly opposite to Out with it is Make sure you really endorse it. Beyond believing something close to it, make sure you believe it, the very thing you said—because someone might quote you, someone might make a decision on the basis of what you say, or someone might decide you don't know what the hell you're talking about even if you do.

So many treasures in a penny's gleam. Penny candy may have died, and pennies are not much offered for our thoughts anymore, and pennies themselves are on the way out, but I hope the Analytic code, Say what you mean and mean what you say, stays with us a while longer.

The Perfection Spectrum

2008-12-22T02:13:00.001-05:00

Suddenly — despite my misgivings ever starting a sentence with such — suddenly, I imagined a world without poets, in two parts.

More Kant than Freud but free of both, first I imagined poetry as equal-opportunity sublimation, subliming both what we want to see and what we don't. What we want to see — the secret centers of our being, well-walked feet soaking in attractively rustic buckets of warm water, 24-hour museums, lives lived up and down but always tethered to our world the space elevator — and what we don't want to see — the blood of children in the streets, corn-dog grease in the carnival midways, half-way houses gutted of half their funding, Aberzombification of old-fashioned promiscuity — All redeemable by the poet, in his picking up each handle of contingency chanced across and kissing it with the lips he has; in his tissue-paper and butcher-paper wrapping of the good bad and ugly alike in probative words of concern and discovery. All boats lifted. All of life's bits, worldly and wordly, deliverable in words from their clichés of meaningless passing and passed over, finally, into clichés themselves in need of further deliverance, unendingly and unendably.

And then I imagined all of this obsolete. A water-wheel world with the goods on their pedestals and the bads buried in holes; the good perfectly actualized and the bad perfectly gone. No gaps between the world we want and the world we have; no need of wordsmiths to forge any bridges across. No need to make ornaments of anything since everything is already self-beautifying: a sphere without a crust.

It was mildly terrifying (like an oncoming car only for two seconds too oncoming, too brief to be true-blue terror). So I added another line to my growing list of reasons why writers write —

To cherish equally both end-zones of the perfection spectrum, close to and far from, in some secular allegiance to the Christian-Apologist message: Beneath the atoms and strings, beneath the sensations and states of being momentarily fragmentarily known, the world is made of redemption.

Blurb

2008-12-22T02:11:00.001-05:00

Awkwardly, reaching to renovate the soul-source, many of my early poems were parts of an attempt to reimagine the divine; more specifically to de-bundle God's perfections and most specifically, to de-couple God's perfect goodness and perfect power. (To update God's downgrade from Being-above-being to Platonic demiurge. And to recognize the full circle therein: If God is Eros again, then God is Love again. A substantive return to his nominal self.) Also, many of my early poems were parts of an attempt to rediscover Buber's divine Thou after decades of scientistic sandstorms. The first attempt followed on the second, since I suspect(ed) that personhood and comprehensive perfection are at odds, even for candidate Gods. Throughout, I made these attempts from the point of view -- under the wide-reflective equilibrium -- of an agnostic.

Craggy Shores & A Lighthouse

2007-01-25T17:43:00.000-05:00

Remember Aristotle's doctrine of the mean? Or Hegel's thesis, -thesis, -thesis? (sic) Instead of remembering them, I bet you're wondering, what good news could possibly follow? -- so I'll spread the gospel without delay.

I've read quite a few poems, enough to be bothered by them. Take your average poem published in The New Yorker: loose. Written in modes the not-so-distant cousins of 'so I was at work today when...', jazzed up with cosmopolitan virtues and references like nigiri toro. That's how they strike me. Now take your average poem from a reputable literary journal (pardon the dint of irresponsibly broad generalization: acknowledged): labored. Full of falsehoods -- some call it license but I prefer to call it ignorance -- and worse, full of shabby metaphysics. I mean shabby. And for the cherry on top, some of these poems are written in formal rhyme and meter which in all but the most capable hands makes them wilt.

So that's pretty harsh. If I were ever commissioned to express these opinions in an essay or interview, I'd have to clean them up a bit. But the core concern is there: So many poems seem lost to me, close to one or the other of two craggy shores, loose and labored. Barely disguised, flaccid, overly self-interested autobiography, or a whole lotta nuttin worked and reworked and reworked and worked to sound like a little sum'in. Sometimes and far too often, both, and not in the way Hegelstotle was getting at.

A quote comes to mind: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." (Said by none other than Paul Dirac, whose discoveries in quantum physics came so fast and cut so deep that many wondered -- some still wonder -- whether they were idiosyncratic inventions that just happened to correspond with reality. Some irony there.)

Every poet worth his pony should be haunted by that quote. Seems to me, few, so few, seem to be.

**Update**

Speak of the devil and the devil delivers: The February 19 & 26 issue of The New Yorker contained three poems and two of them brought me to tears. One brought tears of sadness, and the other tears of joy and sadness mixed -- wistfulness, like. Gorgeous, both. A birthday gift I didn't see coming, and my best. (Although that radio-controlled dragonfly was pretty cool...)

Sort Of A Mission Statement

2007-01-13T02:53:00.000-05:00

A legitimate aim of poetry: the attempted communication of wisdom.

Having wisdom to attempt communicating does not imply that one is wise, as I use the terms. I could be content with the modified Socratic claim that no one is wise. I could add that being wise is but an ideal which animates humankind—a sun and center of our revolutions.

But didacticism is dead, it is said. Poems should be embodiments; they should show but not tell. Keep your wisdom to yourself. I'm big enough to breathe my own ideas and draw from them my own conclusions.

Well. I enjoy vignettes and sometimes whole stories. But life is already made of them. I want something made of it. Even good storytelling—effective prose with an eye on and ear to the panoply of events, cleverly edited—is still just that. That's not to denigrate. Call it a view of narrative modesty.

Let me backpedal. Let's suppose that some stories are more than stories in the modest sense (and perhaps their component images more than mere images, their narrative arcs and twists more than themselves, and so on). That is, suppose a story manages to make something of itself; somehow to establish its own relevance and I'm not left having to rescue it armed only with my affection. Insofar as someone has achieved this meta-narrative magic in a piece of narrative writing by deliberate craft, I cherish it. Cherishability is something I look for in a poem. (Don't mistake this. There are disturbing poems I cherish, and churlish ones, and ones close to coloring outside the lines of decipherability.)

But here is my complaint. 'Embodiment' is a term too easy to satisfy. What if a poet is no more than showing me, cleverly and with some fascination, some piece of his or her life, real or imagined? Maybe you balk: Isn't that enough? No, not for me. If it is for you, fabulous. But I'm looking for something else and not afraid to be writing for those looking for the same something else.

'Wisdom poetry' is a term I would never use in a context where I couldn't caveat and disclaim. But it is something I encounter too little of, and something whose very idea is too often dismissed as so much pedantry, as if to say: because there have been pedants, let's do everything unconsciously—where pedants have no air—and collect the surface lilies from the pond. OK, let's. But let's have other aims, too: let's not limit poetry to the vignette, the story and the unconscious accident/providential stroke.

Poetry could and should be Big Tent.

A Revelation About The Sonnets

2007-01-09T22:35:00.000-05:00

Shakespeare's, that is. I'm no Shakespeare scholar -- in fact, a friend or two will attest, I'm a Shakespeare idiot in most respects -- but I did read his sonnets for a class (back when) and enjoyed some of them. Forgive the following if it is common knowledge.

So I was browsing the sonnets today (baser evils boredom's bred), and it dawned on me -- one of them eureka things -- that their main promise goes unfulfilled. The poet's Great Ink standing against Time's Decay, preserving a shade of (the boy's and/or dark lady's) beauty; a form of immortality that Damned Scythe can't take. That's the promise. But heck, I read and read looking for some penetrating descriptions of the boy's beauty (and whatever other of his components one might wish to preserve) and came up short. Just an occasional vague reference to his lips or legs, the usual horndog-cum-romantic metaphors.

So Shakespeare spends all this time pontificating on the nature of perseverance and preservation, without actually doing any. I want to know about the kid. Did he like to swim? Cute laugh? What were his thoughts on Aristotle? If his soul is too much to ask the Ink to hold, then for chrissakes at least describe his personality.

It's a good warning for me, since I go meta pretty often and forget the primary task. Pretty sure I've rung this bell before, but I'm trying to get better at balancing the act of speaking *to* the fabled reader (which overlaps with going meta, in my understanding) and speaking *about* my concerns.

Hey, so

2007-01-07T17:39:00.000-05:00

does anyone read these solipsistic musings? I should admit, they're more journal entries than notices, updates, or shout-outs. Technically they are 'logs' but I wouldn't want to read the logs of say, pilots, so it's understandable that most people aren't all that interested in my thoughts on the process and motivations peculiar to writing poems. I suppose I could talk about something else. Well, I do talk about other things, but indirectly; poem-writing is the lens. So I suppose I could use another lens.

But this prose mood has come to dominate. I hesitate to say -- yikes -- this is the real me, because there are at least a couple other real mes. The me of my poems, for instance, takes more risks, is more concise (there's an understatement), and has different concerns. His are words for lost dogs. And for the newly faithless: He works in glowing remnants of lost certainties. His message isn't buck up! but rather bear down! and adjust your eyes to a glow dimmer than you wanted but brighter than you might have imagined. In pretty stark contrast (no?), this prose me has words for insomniacs and addicts of the discursive sentence and thought. These posts are perhaps the quixotic equivalents of late-night infomercials, all sell and sizzle, talking around and around and around the product. What do you mean this isn't sizzle? Why you ungrateful little--. Try reading the essays of Wallace Stevens. They could put a typewriter to sleep. (That said, they're loaded with insights, or near-insights, since in my view he never broke through the sugar ceiling of almost saying the unsayable. He came heart-arrestingly close, though. That's my take but I don't think I could argue for it because it's a feeling his writing instills in me. Some would disagree, I'm sure, and call me naive and claim that going any further than he did would be to write the clever kitsch of reified understanding. There, I've given a future critic a label for my poems.)

I'm in a sort of trance these days. Is that true? It feels true. In social situations I break from it. When I eat or spend time with Arman, I break from it. I percolate back up to my senses, which are perhaps stronger from any meditative muscle my tranciness has toned.

Feel free to post some comments. I welcome any and all. I mean, you're right, talking at walls and responding to imaginary voices is something I'm skilled in (see), but feedback from the living is nice, too.

Line Breaks

2007-01-06T17:25:00.000-05:00

must be related to cats. Understanding aside, often they elude one's best efforts even to befriend them. Curious creatures, they.

A line break causes and solves problems. It interrupts the scan of a poem (if not the reading of it) but it may add something to the line interrupted: line-meaning. Thanks partly to the break (and partly to the words and punctuation that operate before it), the whole line gets to break from the rest of the poem and raise its own flag of meaning. The flag might be a discrete thought; a whisper of some unfinished thought, provocatively or otherwise purposefully unfinished; a resonance word or phrase (often the pivot of a thought or the turning point in a story); or a summary or encapsulation or focal point of what has been said or of what will be said. Line-meanings come packaged with many intentions, and their effects on one's attentions are more various still.

But let me make this more personal. Sometimes I wake, like I did this morning, with thoughts about how to change a set of line breaks in a poem I've already written (in this case, an old poem I hadn't thought much about since writing). I make the changes and save a new version. Potentially something gained; nothing lost. But then I smoke on the thought: It's strange how fragile a poem is. I'm more amenable to edits than a lot of would-be poets are, I bet, especially in the first hours after a poem's would-be birth and in the first couple days after that. But it's strange. I change a stanza's line breaks and the whole poem has a new light. Sometimes it's brighter and I get a little tickle in the stomach, and sometimes it's dimmer but I feel like I did the right thing. Switching metaphors, poems as I currently write them are balloons in their early stages of being blown: A little inhalation and the thing sags and wrinkles (sometimes interestingly); a little push of breath and it tightens and expands.

And since my relationship to poems as I currently write them is more that of discoverer than architect, there's a feedback in play when I change a few line breaks. Usually my unhappiness with some break -- it's too boring and too many near it are boring (boring breaks are inevitable -- if everything sings you get noise -- but too many and you can sap a poem's energy), or it's posturing more depth than it can deliver, or it's confusing and not a good confusing, and so on -- is what starts me down the road (that runs through sleep) to changing it. But once I do change it, the game is up for grabs. The words added to or taken from the following line make it necessary to re-think that line and its break. And the process repeats itself on down the poem (If I sound like a programmer checking his own code, that's because I am, in effect.). Then the wholes get their say: Each stanza and the full poem, in their new light, make me want to tinker with line breaks poem-wide all the more. Sometimes I resist but usually I don't.

I realize I'm making this sound more neurotic than it really is. O the navels I've gazed. It's a burden, yes, but most times it's also fun -- fine lines, I suppose, between compulsions and needs and between needs and pleasures.

A Little Language

2006-11-09T08:47:00.000-05:00

I'm probably not the first to think of this, but I thought I'd say: If someone noun-izes your party -- calling it, say, the 'Democrat Party' -- feel free to noun-ize theirs. If you're feeling feisty, you could even add that a 'Republic Party' is, historically, one step closer to an 'Empire Party' than is a democratic one (sic).

Thank God (or our Lucky Stars, perhaps)

2006-11-09T08:45:00.000-05:00

The dissembler and his backseat bullies disassembled. The bluff and bluster called on the mat. A six-year aberration at least partially corrected and justice, though delayed, delivered. Even through the fog of wars against their own ideals -- freedoms restricted in the name of freedom, democracy promulgated by gunpoint, Christian pride, promotion, and certainty, not so different than anecdotal Lucifer's, standing proxy for love and peace -- even through this, a chain reaction of scattered majorities voted for 'terrorism' and 'the culture of death' ('death taxes', even). I thought I might have to finish out my twenties under this cloud darkening even our language, but now I feel grateful to be part of this country again: Far, far, far from perfect, but how wistfully and agonizingly, how chaotically but also how durably, good.

The Republican Southern Strategy still a living memory -- Ken Mehlman only last year confessing in no uncertain terms to the NAACP convention that when the party took political advantage of southern racist opposition to desegregation, it was morally wrong -- the party now courts black candidates to atone and to compete. I really hope to live to see the day, maybe three or four decades from now, when the party comes to the HRC or its future equivalent and apologizes for Republican Strategy #2. In all honesty, it takes me two times to learn anything, too.

The Problem of Authority

2006-08-21T03:03:00.000-04:00

We're supposed to have a Muse -- really a daemon, in the old sense. We're supposed to not know why we write what we write. It's supposed to be a movement of energies beyond our accounting, as often it seems. But this general view opens up a trap: that writing a poem is being given a guided tour of you and your quirks, should the Muse be amused to do so. The Muse is the cause of all this autobiography turned to phrase! Trust the Muse!

What if a poem is a movement of your conscience instead? -- with you and your quirks doing the lifting, the shifting of anecdotes and understandings along lines of illumination? If a poem is wholly *yours* to make, how nicely and naturally it frees you from writing it about you; if you accept the challenge. (And with no external agent interested in you, your own interest in you is then that much harder to hide.) You're not then the mystery nor the mysterious instrument. You're just you, with a conscience boiling over, once in a great while the whole spilled mess crystallizing.

Sorry. This isn't an argument; just an idea, and a version of a very old one. With Brahman or God to look forward to attaining, joining, or serving well, it's easy to think our lives are lines of eternity and as such, significant to the very last detail. And maybe they are! But perhaps only if we direct them toward something larger than life-bound, and only if we excavate meaning from their events -- hoping that's what it is, anyway. If instead we merely record, content no matter the content (as long as enough personal pleasure sweetens the mix), then I would worry these lines of eternity, these lives of ours, are merely geometric: cold as ice without a reason to exist. So it's a less-than-airtight catch-22: External agency lording over us can allow us to slip more comfortably back into our (then, because unstriving, less meaningful) lives, while the lack of one can spur us to make what matters matter and fall, if not into nihilism, into the tragic scenario of believing we alone did this. Curious, this silent God of ours.

A Moral Question

2006-07-10T14:10:00.000-04:00

In abstractions, the magic is thin -- more holes than net -- but casts wide. It's not nothing, but it is in limbo: less than material but more than immaterial. Like a list, or an argument, or the feeling of a kiss, the kiss aside. I don't want abstractions. They're just signposts of what I want: reified understanding, in the form of a netherworld as real as this one. A place I could hangout in and haunt, with the benefit that the beauty that here I struggle to find in the fog and then keep close would be built into the place, as everywhere obvious as the lined or unlined sky.

In the heated idle hours most of my present life is made of, I square the circle by discursively meditating, breeding thoughts and brooding around them, looking in at them radially; every so often brainstorming out of memory the simplest mathematical facts that smirk something mysterious, curiosities curiously more than accidental, or so they seem.

It's not emptiness I come to but it's not understanding either. Shouldering the path is a moral question: Should I need a reason to return to thoughts I entertain always with the backburning hope that I can possess them -- like marbles of worlds caught in a drawstring pouch -- but with the knowledge that I can't? Can anything intimate in the end be remembered as more than the nameless, orphaned joy (of having meant something once) it soon enough becomes?

Revitalization

2006-07-06T21:17:00.000-04:00

I could tweak the algebra, smooth the curves, and stitch a better-flying kite. High and wide as a cicada song. A symbol of the tents underneath, and underneath of which conversations wander happily, one leg for comfort talk, the other taken with an odd energy for ideas. Thinktents, with everyone invited. Woodstock with books for music (and music and bonfires on the beach, come dusk); time to be social and time to retreat, at the same time. Found objects, the whole lot, and found subjects too.

But the field of play would still be this one, full of dirt clods and anthills. I'd make the field a park again, but how? I'd need to reinvent the town—from this dried one, from these beer and soda lives, on their long slope down from few dreams to fewer—from this no place, to a place. From utopia to eutopia. But how?

By holding to the text and threading it through the day. I'll invite friends with words and keep them with wine and words. Some words will slip their clothes off, and fuse for afternoons of jamais vu. We'll encourage them in this.

With more words, I'll ask the businesses if they might sell the town the town, rather than remedies for it. Rather than antidotes of unending strip malls of dead silk flowers and movies to rent and auto and marine supplies (sooner to forget and escape the place) and second-hand lives of clothes and tapes and toys that never mattered much the first time (sooner to store it away).

I'll stand tall enough to ask: Whatever the exchange rate, can we trade in this kitsch for an ideal or two? Can we relieve this drought?

A bluff to snuff

2006-06-30T21:20:00.000-04:00

A symptom of the age? Beyond the doublespeak, we also have carefully loaded terms. Take this one: 'I don't believe in X'. If X is angels or aliens, I have no complaints. But X is sometimes 'sesame seeds on pizza crust' or 'same-sex marriage'. You could argue that 'I don't believe in sesame seeds on pizza crust' is just synonymous for 'I don't like sesame seeds on pizza crust'; just a new-fashioned way of saying it. I think there's more to it. I would guess that either an evil wordsmith or an unconscious one got the better of someone somewhere some time ago, and invented the farce of 'I don't believe in X'.

Here's the logic. 'I don't believe' carries more authority and weight than 'I don't like/approve of'. Lack of belief in something is meant to coincide with reasons not to believe in it. I don't believe in unicorns because I have good reasons to believe they don't exist (no geological evidence; they have not been found among present species, while most regions have been explored, etc.). On the other hand, the connotations of 'I don't like' are only that my tastes are specific and limited, as are everyone's. Someone can answer 'I don't like' with 'That's nice. I do.' So, 'I don't believe in X' connotes that there are reasons not to believe in X (even if I don't supply them), while 'I don't like X' connotes untrammeled personal choice.

And here's the new wrinkle: the use of 'I don't believe in X' in cases where X obviously exists. 'I don't believe in sesame seeds on pizza crust' then serves as a way of saying 'No to sesame seeds on pizza crust -- would it were that pizza crust didn't have sesame seeds' rather than the more humble, 'None on mine, please.' It's an invitation and recommendation to deny reality to something; to appropriate the connotation of 'I don't believe in X' (there are impersonal, everywhere-applicable reasons not to believe in X) for the purpose of globalizing a personal preference.

Maybe I'm just harping on Rhetoric Millennium 3.0 -- after all, one of the original "trivial" disciplines is allowed progress, right? But it bugs me. When language is likely to have a component of subliminal advocacy, all participants should know as much: as when a reader ventures into a debate, or into an editorial, or into a poem.

Another easy definition

2006-06-29T13:17:00.000-04:00

"A great poem is a perfect blend of sense and sound; it is memorable speech." Another easy definition, bewitchingly well-put. I've been making a list of the definitions of 'poetry' and 'a [good/great/worthy] poem' I come across (maybe at some point I'll steer my curiosity toward a research project). So far, the definitions have all been poetically phrased and absurdly untrue. Even reading them generously, I can't get past their blithe partiality. And even granting that most everything is partial -- doubly so, only part of the story and only part of the story according to you -- partiality should never be blithe. Otherwise, ignorance at best and minor intellectual totalitarianism at worst.

In the case of well-blended sense and sound, the half of the story left out is that some great poems are merely visual, deliberately or effectively. Not every poem resounds in the ear; some resound only in the eye or the inner understanding. Not to mention the deaf (and Deaf) poets who sign their poems.

Are we stuck? Are all epigrams and short shocking claims ultimately pretty shining lies? If so, as a self-described truth-seeker, I'm screwed: One of my main poetic modes is a kind of concatenated or continuous epigram.

The hope I'm hoping to rely on is the regard one can have for what is not said or not sayable. But how to write that regard in, and how to read it out? I don't know. I'm still working on that. It borders on one of the bigger questions I have: how to know what you say is true. Don't launch "What is truth?" against me. Truth is in your conscience, and in mine, and bits of it echo in the 3 or 4 philosophical theories of it.

All told, I love definitions, things nestled and things nested. I'm trying to catch what I can in webs that don't kill or maim, and which acknowledge the worlds small and large they connect. Things caught only for the moment actual.

Apology

2006-06-27T22:04:00.000-04:00

Don't mind me. I know I can sound like an underheated attorney on crack and science, but he's just a character of mine who shares my concerns. I'm the same old Chris. Maybe you never knew the same old Chris. He jokes a lot, meows a lot, still thinks the SCAT bus system should be renamed, puts lots of black pepper on his chicken sandwiches, and despite his castles in the sky, is afraid of heights.

I can't clear the air of pretense. It comes rolling in like fog. I'm still learning how to ask words to model my sensibility beyond my thoughts, without degenerating into IM-speak (speaking of which, I wrote a poem recently in the form of an IM chat). It's going slow -- see, I was tempted to say, slow going.

I would say, we are who we are, but of course we're not. Not really. We're protean machines: part meme and perhaps part soul. All in the ratio and in its flux? I have a strange muse, a boy-beauty scrubbed of most his boy beauty so that I can concentrate on what little remains. The world is too much with us -- until we look at it from across the way?

Intermittency

2006-06-27T21:21:00.000-04:00

This urge to cling to strips and sheets and bound bundles of text is surely old, but in this age the urge has become self-conscious. Cite the zeitgeist: The text can seem more real or sincere or interesting than any world it might refer to. The text can be definitive -- just those characters with that syntax, coming together some one way -- even in this era of promiscuous mixing, when the definitive text is only the easy childhood before the mad scramble. The stacks of blocks before the waves of ambiguity come toppling.

Cellular automata may be worn thin these days, with Rucker and Wolfram and company fashioning them as The Answer, but they illustrate the point. Take the few ordered characters of a text as the few simple computational rules of a cellular program. Then the structures that come tumbling out of the program -- periodic, chaotic, or intermittent -- are analogous to the meanings that come tumbling out of a text. (Although, one text may have many meanings, some continuous and some subject to gestalt-jumps, whereas a program-generated structure sits instantiated, utterly itself. So perhaps we should draw the analogy not between meanings and structures, but between meanings and patterns we locate in the structures.) In either domain, sustained intermittency is the prize; the harmonies and counterpoints; the Hegelian synthesis after synthesis.

I'm trying to get past all this. To build a post-postmodern room in my mind's MOMA, and one that isn't merely modern again. Actually, the room is up and the lights installed, but the commissions are in the works. The artists keep sending letters, progress reports of sorts, saying things like, "The strongest notes are earth tones. More Zen than granola, but beyond both..." and "Images of God keep coming up. A hesitant, heartbroken God, undergoing a conversion from Architect to Concerned Citizen. Lots of milky orange and sub-luminous light...”

extreme disjunction

2006-06-21T16:48:00.000-04:00

no day is forgettable; otherwise, every day is.

a corollary: whimpers matter as much as bangs. this could very well be a lesson we're here to learn, whether or not we're here to learn any. the same way the existential sisyphus isn't here to be happy, but can be despite knowing that. as neo put the obvious, the issue is choice.

you protest: my disjunction is extreme, and worse, untrue. some days suck, you say. i'll give you that -- but forgettable?

for me it comes down to this: i don't want to forget any of this, if any of it matters (and if none of it does, i'd sooner forget it all). agreed, some days life feels too lived-in. still, i want to believe trivia doesn't trivialize, but coats a bearable lightness of being on top of so much plastered-on purpose; it keeps the dice rolling; it keeps the fundamentalists busy and the rest of us reaching.

snap out of it, you say: each day, however coated, isn't a microcosmic marvel -- holy moments are special, not general.

i leap at the chance to say: that isn't for us to say.

time to sublimate

2006-06-21T16:47:00.000-04:00

to paraphrase a friend, i wish i had the wisdom not to write this. but it's been one of those weekends, so here goes.

thursday night i was reminded how not to entrust your feelings with people you don't know well. tonight i learned the lesson again, at another level, from a brighter candle. those were the bookends.

my negative but heartfelt manhunt profile served as some kind of inverse philosopher's stone, but not in the way i expected. i expected the usual defensiveness and accusations of bitterness from guys on there, but the large majority of responses were positive. i may have even made a friend from "the ass-end of the universe", who described our resonance thusly: "i seem to have met my evil twin. or maybe i'm your evil twin. either way, uncanny." he got my sense of humor, and i got his, and that doesn't happen much. the double date looms in the indefinite future (he's hitched too).

and yet, points 2 and 3 came home to roost big time, when i wasn't manhunting in name or in fact. i won't get into it, because it's time to sublimate:

i've come to believe that i am most myself in my words. at first i thought such an idea was run-of-the-mill insane (in real life, i'm a nice person with a sentimental streak; i'm an amused didactic fuck in my writing), but over the years the logic has shone through. my poems have become miniature altars to this and that -- ones i'm not ashamed to need or attend. like franz wright's have. i don't know if franz is the man his poems suggest he is, but i am the man i want to be in my poems. and by that i mean nothing less than: i have found (a very unusual, personal but sublime) god in them; i have discovered/invented reasons to continue my life, with or without him/it; i have rediscovered a language my head dreamed of using but my life never allowed; i have begun to understand and undertake my past; i have had moments where i felt honored to exist, even if my existence means nothing more than charming the pants off this model reader i have in mind, who will see my footnotes and rub his eyes in disbelief, just before the unstoppable smile comes across and winds its way through a day reclaimed.

acid afternoon

2006-06-21T16:46:00.000-04:00

my new manhunt profile:

(1) there are no such things as tops and bottoms (unless we're talking quarks). if you need to play roles and dress-up to wrap your mind around the idea that you're into guys, i wish i could show you how boring a pattern your matrix code makes.

(2) your constant wit is really just tiring sarcasm. hurt-you-first humor isn't very funny, but it does breed more of itself, so i can see how you might think you're gaining.

(3) honesty isn't gold. it's a god; one we can access from here. try it. everyone will take advantage of you, yes, but you'll have peace of mind, and with luck, or karma, or providence, you may even be rewarded.

***

in a more careful mood, here is (1) restated:

(1') there are no such things as tops and bottoms, except by choices we make and make until they harden into habits. sure, your choices may feel natural: but what are you willing to rule out because of them?

for a future treatise, part two

2006-06-21T16:44:00.000-04:00

Most of the time I don't trust regular rhyme because as I write one, the aim of a poem is to capture or release the essence of something, and I believe the essence is the long shot in a contest of schemes. Notable exceptions excepted for a predetermined number of syllables or words a poem contains, but rarely for predetermined alignments of sound: What can be said can always (to a point) be said in fewer words, but not always in fewer or more regular sounds. This has been true of my experience and it may not generalize. But if I have to scheme with sound, I would rather do it retrodictively. I would rather the sounds be like pieces of a puzzle coming together somewhat, if they do.

You could say to my detriment, I don't believe anything is exactly trite. Unthinking, yes; over-thought, perhaps; thought-out without first surveying, the assumed self-sufficient monad too much trusted, very much so. But to believe anything is trite is to succumb to a view of language that it is ruled by fashion: Too much use means we have to flee to the new, rather than work our ways there at whatever pace we might and for whatever reasons. Who would avoid words because they have already been reached, as if each string of words is but the trace of a game of chess, one more sequence of moves for the annals to study? Who would avoid words for this and no other reason? Not because you have fallen on them and wish to get up; not because they have seduced you against your will or done the thinking for and without you. But because you have heard them or seen them n and one too many times. For some, n = 1.

Every use of words is whatever else, advocacy of their use, meaning they express, or both. Much advocacy work bears persistence; versions and versions. This fact is not alone a mark against it. The path to utter originality leads to utter loneliness, and often to incomprehensibility.

You should say what you need to say. You should also learn everything you can, aiming at the best command you can manage of what has been said in the way it was said, consistent with a healthy resting heart-rate and sense of peace. And if the time comes when you need to say, "the science of the night", I hope you won't shrink from your task. I hope you will resist wondering if it is trite, and instead wonder what is gained in the saying of it. You should say what you need to say. Look for your answers everywhere, edit them always, but trust them at last.

A Metaphysic for Poetry

Partly because we expect a symmetry between what they represent and the facts, we make them the way we do, and partly because we make them, technical concepts can be fixed. The natural numbers that are prime, for example, can be fixed: definitionalized into necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept of primality which while subject to refinement in congress with other concepts, is itself modular: self-sufficient: finished.

Many concepts, like poetry, are not fixed because even the essence of poetry (whatever that is and if even it exists) has not yet finished coming into being. Poetry is unfolding in every age and each of their moments bring new forms and refinements. Unfinished, poetry cannot be fixed. And thus it has no necessary conditions: We can't say what poetry invariably is if poetry is varying.

I believe this platitude is true: We must be content with poems as sufficient instances of poetry. If we are forced to a definition of poetry, then it can be defined as the whole grab-bag of sufficiencies: all the poems. Of course, everyone's bag has different contents, so take for the definition the whole Bag of all the individual bags. It will be too big for any of us (and part of whose contents only the future can supply), but that is alright. Here's the thing: When a piece of text has sufficient echoes to a poem in your bag and to your cut of the Bag (however much you can manage), it goes in both. The sufficiency of the echo is again individual, but we already knew that.

By all means, broadcast your principles (if you have them; and if you need to) according to which poems go in your bag: detail your sufficiencies. Just, if you would, don't call them necessities. That assumes poetry is done and you have surveyed every poem and you have found the beating heart of each.

for a future treatise, part one

2006-06-21T16:43:00.000-04:00

Since I don't trust the gifts of demons of either the ancient or modern breed, I want to know thought went into a poem. Even if the space it explores is more limbic than cerebral, there is no excuse for a sloppy indulgent tour through limbic space when careful tempered tours abound. For a journal entry to be a poem, for example, it should have more than line breaks, as critics have requested. It should have embedded meanings; whether pitched images, propositions and their echoes, discoveries of language or narrative, it should contain words that draw toward ideas, if not exhibit them.

A poem should reward the further study that comes after the early inroads. It should be at some level or another a lesson, though one that seeks valuation where normally one expects evaluation. The lesson need not be and usually should not be directly stated (unless, none the worse for the poem, there is a lesson accomplished in part by the direct stating of a lesson); rather, it can be embodied in the midst of its materials of construction; it can be the statue in the clay. But charming, disarming, or neither, proselytizing or not, tendering a lesson caught as a cat in a mirrored cage or a lesson wild as a solar flare, a poem should be at worst esoteric: never static.

Actually, there is room in poetry for the celebration of static, but too many poems are themselves static. Indeed, celebrations of static as static -- static personalized as the accidents and coincidences recruited to help locate a poem, static cleaving to the edges of the known, static as silence between the signals -- often work with and for a poem. And indeed, generally, both writers and readers of poetry affirm the truism that poems can use language to do something outside of language. They may share a mystery, shed an illusion, carve out a niche for a rare or frequent feeling, transform a thing into its relations, or, needling it in some novel way with the world, empty a phrase of its meaning, or fill it. But a poem is not its parts and aims: A sequence of words that uses neither static nor signal nor their ratio, neither gesture nor syntax nor their relation, to any great effect, is not yet a poem.

You may ask, Isn't the effect in the eye of the affected? And in the eyes of the age, as the spectrum of prevailing orthodoxies? I find myself unable to believe in the project of poetry without answering, Not entirely. And in the balance -- or rather, in the lack of balance between transmission and reception, between perspicuous poem and ready reader -- lies poetry.

redux

2006-06-21T16:41:00.000-04:00

i felt that smile, overpasses and underpasses away, the miles between us. what's in a smile? -- creeping across and holding us together, for the moment content in the belief there's a me looking for you beneath it.

there's no need to be cryptic. the world's not a crypt. well, not yet.

the dance remix of the theme song to ghost taught me something: i'm haunted.

you?

nothing and something

2006-06-21T16:39:00.001-04:00

now that i know that there are three people who read this thing, i feel compelled to feel compelled to write here. you know by now that everything's second-order with me.

rainstorms on a full moon tonight. two phenomena i love, cancelling each other out. is there a meaning? well, no -- but i'll whip one up.

look here: it's the zero ontology. i bought into this idea for a while, and still have tendencies. the idea is, the universe is literally nothing. if you're a whack-job quantum theorist, it's a (keyword) little more sensible... the quantum state of the universe being a giant superposition (work with me here) the tensor-product components of which exactly oppose and counterbalance one another. a reified equation that cancels itself out, more or less. we tread down a path -- 'look at this! and this! and turn away from that... look at this!' -- but really, could we see the state of all paths, there's nothing; something being incomplete nothing and nothing being the whole fact.

yeah, dark. but liberating too, in the way rarified nihilism can be. but like all these thought-games, too much is left out (pun intended: shame on you. and, congratulations)... the question, 'why is nothing everything' gets explained 'because everything is nothing', and the question, 'well, why is that?' gets a reflexive 'nothing needs no explanation; you're thinking of something again'. it's a toxic case of begging the question, or you could say, of loading most of your theory into its premise. still, it sparkles, the way miniature theorems in number theory can.

someone asked me if my poems are going to suffer if i start blogging -- getting ideas down and getting prosy when i might be suffering them until they come out as poems. i have two answers to that question.

1) i have a poem that begins:
[Your god isn't as good
as my]
that sits neglected on a corner of my desk.

2) the poems i've written in the past few weeks, though few, make me glad i'm giving this a shot.

so here i am. i sort of like it, being in this eye of the storm even though i know danger abounds. my self-concept is going to supervene on what happens in the next year or two. will i remain a poet? will i emerge a new, career poet? will i want to stay in florida, move to nyc, or pine for toronto? will arman and i continue this trend we've recently begun, of meeting people here and making friends? will they hold us here? i want them to. but i also think about that chocolate commune with elliot and company.

things are far from perfect, but this is what i wanted: to be always at the beginning of an adventure worth beginning. to savor the potential of things, with bursts of actuality (you know, to keep it real).

Everyman's dilemma

2006-06-21T16:35:00.000-04:00

days like those, i remember why buddhism. if only i could dip into that disconnected calm and emptiness, at will. these days the closest i come is listening to a lowercase-t trancy song on repeat for a couple of hours.

it's a tough one. if my happiness depends on other people doing what i expect them to, i'll be as contingent as the stock market. but if i removed myself entirely -- the old self-reliance bit -- then what am i here for? personal gnostic growth? i feel the nobility of that idea deeply, but i can't embrace it... blame this on a too-early exposure to jewish mysticism (eighth grade, sidetracked from book hunting for a report)... i can't help believing we shards of the Absolute, if we are and if it exists, have something to do with and for one another. a conditional belief, but a sincere one: we aren't monads. the world minus me isn't just educational panorama-vision.

so there is Everyman's dilemma: find yourself, or find your place. they'll try to tell you there's no conflict, that you'll be most yourself in a place of your discovering or inventing; but once there, if you look closely, you may find that you stand out as the alien artifact all the more, wondering, 'does the universe want this? does it want me to want this? or is it frankfurtian in its tolerance?: loving this (you pick the this) is the very reason for this.'

by contrast, it's easier to know what you are as a gear turning with the rest toward some good, and for your own (hence religion), but then, what are you? a means? a gear, with some choice of turning speed? -- one that can suspect as much? how interestingly awful. ... so either way, taking a role (assuming a place) begs the question, i think, of who is taking it. on the other hand, taking the time to figure out what and who you are leads to a kind of world-weariness; to a sort of angst about there being no instruction manual, no diagram labeling you as which gear. ... find yourself: arbitrary in your role or determined in it. find your place: who am i to find it? i think we could do better without either bit of folk advice, since neither one amounts to much, and each pulls against the other.

i have a way out, but i don't always hold to it. and of course, it's both unoriginal and for most, still heresy (by whatever name). count me among those mystics: the Absolute did (or is) split, and we are splinters. we're not gears because we're not a wholly separate creation; and we're not arbitrary pick-your-flavor oversouls either (the freedom of which is their reason to exist), since we really are some of the broken Absolute, who, somehow collected or collecting, has an agenda. 'but uncle chris, an agenda is future-oriented... what if the Absolute is timeless?' well, then it only dabbles in time: it knows how to time, at least. beneath the nausea at the idea, there is room for the belief that our infinite future is only unending from here; that all and any of this mere progression, all of this mere matter mattering, matters.

retrospective

2006-06-21T16:33:00.000-04:00

given the chance -- if being directly direct is cock-sure and being indirectly indirect is lost -- i'm indirectly direct. but confession doesn't suffice; these blog posts embarrass me. i come across as someone who hasn't been outside in weeks. scholastic, i guess.

often when i read a poem i wrote 10 or 14 months ago, it embarrasses me too, and i feel a difficult, mixed feeling of gratitude and disappointment: gratitude that i get to edit or banish it (to a 'history' folder), and disappointment because i then have to recharge my belief that a poem has more than its moment; the moment when it worked. then again, there are a few poems that have survived my rereads and criticism for years (though by few i do mean few), so often i recharge by attempting to believe its moment can be renewed. disappointment lingers, because i can't foresee the list of who gets renewed: every poem a firework in free-fall, beautiful and blustering to one or another degree and in the dark unknowing of whether its encore is coming.

what of it? choices. let my optimist run loose, nakedly sure crazy-era nash-like that everything matters and is simmering toward some synthesis, muttering, 'process! process! the path, the means, is meandering toward something, and anyway, is an end in itself!' ... or let my more natural voice intrude: 'think of what you want a poem to be -- sermon? (what sort? didactic? casual? self-deprecating?) code? discovery? self-discovery? -- then put up the scaffolding, then build with the building in sight. don't worry if you have to change the plan several times midway. no one is going to de-fund the project.'

i try to listen to both. it's taxing. but it feels honest, and honesty is a friend of embarrassment.

preconditions

2006-06-21T16:32:00.000-04:00

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.

posing

2006-06-21T16:31:00.000-04:00

the phrase 'help me spread my words' stands out in my mind, and won't sit down. 'spread' is most naturally what happens to seeds or diseases or memes, the connotation being that survival trumps worthiness. i keep thinking how a year and some months back i resisted the idea that too many would-be poets seek publication and too few seek help in becoming better poets. i wanted to go on believing that my meandering, formal, often didactic poetic voice, bent on finding epigrammatic gems and conclusions, was worth the chase -- and didn't need to be caught and tamed.

things have changed. i've come to see that at its worst, poetry is an unhappy marriage of narcissism and solipsism; and although two 'isms' seldom bear sweet fruit, these two only bring out the worst in each. rilke was right, in his letters, advising patience and advising writing out of deep need (without which life would be less, if not nothing) and need of discovery. he was right to say that publication is derivative and later, if ever; that achieving something public can never be the goal. i half-believed him before, but wanted to avoid any sticky implications. now i believe him fully, and this despite the fact that his poetry speaks to me less now than before.

i guess it's another instance of the trend: the more seriously i take myself, the more modest my goals become.

i will never ask for help spreading my words. i won't ask for help *sharing* them either: i will earn it, if i can.

the halting problem, for blogs

2006-06-21T16:29:00.000-04:00

i just took a shower. but that is the most concrete thing i have to say.

in that shower, my thoughts were cascading, the way they were a year back when i was using the steam to 'steam-glue' sheets of paper to my shower, so that i could write the thoughts coming in streams like the water: words and lines of poems, parts and sometimes even whole poems.

strange, a blog is a sounding board; a diary; a sort of bulletin; and probably other things besides. it is a new sensation for me, since i am for the most part intensely private and since my sounding boards have been my own thoughts, my partner, and my few e-mail pals. strange but fun to think a few of the curious might gander down these lines, and a few of the few might be taken with something like interest. it is the same with poems: they are the workings-out of my own concerns, as well as embodiments of larger concerns. the calculated frolicking of ideas that matter to me, with a door cracked and opening a line of light others, if willing, may follow to somewhere they've seen but in different light.

marvin bell says autobiography rots (number 10 of his 'thirty-two statements about writing poetry', which i more or less follow), and i tend to agree with him. yet here is a sanctioned space for fatuous self-absorption: memoir without an editor to tone you down and broaden your appeal and relevance. or so it seems.

yet here is the chance to wiggle things into words without the pressure of it being all that worthy. here, even, is the democratic ideal that worthiness comes of process: of wordiness. it's all very new and exciting, even though i had a friend in college, ken (hi ken), who i remember back in the hinter-era of 1998 or 99 posting internet entries to what i think he called a journal, well before this craze got going. i remember wondering where he found the time, but ken was a marvel of efficiency on a bottle or three of jolt (my own poison of choice was red bull, back when it was new and 'small' and 'gross, like liquid smarties' -- back before it was widely discovered). i guess i have to admit that smarties, jolt, red bull and ken are all concrete.

so this is the halting problem for blogs. the churning continues, and a thought can't think itself over. (relatively) unfiltered thoughts are fun, even in this accumulating glut of memoir and personality cults that we call the new millenium. by now you see certain idioms -- or are they cadences? or are they memes? -- that i rely on in writing prose sentences. the thing is, i don't usually write the big, generalized, overbearing academic sentences that much anymore (i save those for the poems, ha!), so what gives? the spirit of pine view has found me, i guess, in more ways than one.

super-condensed update

2006-06-21T16:27:00.000-04:00

so i got to thinking about a friend of mine up in boston who despises the word 'blog'. he thinks it's one of the ugliest words ever unleashed. i remember a conversation that went something like, 'but carl, a blog is a fun concept. and i've seen worse abbrevs., even if 'blog' does sound kind of bloated and soggy...'. which brings me to my point: i think word-arguments (by which i mean, arguments over the comparative beauty, origins, and uses of words) are pretty fun. try one with someone you know well enough to have a word-argument with, but not as well as you would like. you get to try out ideas that don't usually come up when the conversation ranges over workspace drama, favorite restaurants, and the weather.

in other news, i have been found by pine view alums cathy and amber. it's sort of a strange feeling, since this is my first contact with anyone from pine view (with 2 exceptions) in nearly nine years. for a long time i have treasured the relative anonymity i have achieved. i guess it began as a consequence of the butterfly syndrome... i've changed, a lot, and i'm gay (maybe to some, 'Duh'? i'm not sure. and to anyone it concerns: seth and i were never lovers. ha). which to mainly liberal/libertarian pv students is probably a non-issue, but it was a big issue for me, for a long time, as i gradually outgrew my asexuality and discovered the odd flashes of interest, attraction, and affection i felt toward members of my own sex were not, after all, flukes. plus i changed from a booksmart kid into something else entirely... a deeply theoretical but deeply flaky premature grad student. i decided physics was a joke (i still think it is, but it's a funnier one these days: and by that i mean, it wasn't right for me at all), and philosophy was where i belonged. so i tried to learn if academic philosophy could really suit me career-wise, decided it just might, but then decided i preferred philosophical poems and essays. which brings me close to the present moment, since i spend several days each week reading and waiting for inspiration to strike (pardon the cliche, but that it how it works).

i've had a fun ride, though, in case i'm coming across too strongly as the whiny brat i've been and sometimes am. maybe i'll get into some of that on this potential time-sink-hole into narcissism, myspace. that sounds too dark: maybe i'll get into some of that on this strange outcropping of an overly connected age, on this happy-home spreadsheet of our post-modern apocalyptic utopia. (yeah, for purposes of entertainment, i can still write sentences like that: tell mr. mccracken it was all bullshit.)

even now my social-liberal angst cries,
it wasn't ALL bullshit!
...
long live the lumpenproletariat!

first things first

2006-06-21T16:21:00.000-04:00

ok, full disclosure: i'm brand new to myspace as of 4/24/06. and sad but true: i didn't seriously look into myspace until i read an article off yahoo yesterday that said some community college in texas banned myspace from its computer labs. i clicked on the headline expecting to read about censorship, and whaaa? 40% of internet traffic was to myspace? using up bandwidth? they had to do something?

so maybe it was time to see what the fuss is about... maybe yahoo and manhunt and salon and nyt online needed a new bookmark companion. yeah, i know. but i live in my own little wor(l)d most of the time, only slightly intersected by the larger one. i should be a buddhist or a physicist. ... wait, i've been both of those.

don't be afraid. beneath the layers and layers of dork, there is a cool streak.

and beneath that streak, dork all the way down.