Sunday, September 15, 2013

Reading the newspaper headlines first thing does not do it for the mind.
You had weird dreams at night, teeth falling out, troubles and irresponsibility.
You had thoughts as you woke, observations about passivity,
Jesus, egoless, in balance with a feminine side.  Vulnerability allows intimacy, so of course there's the tendency to go about it the wrong way, as if aggression and conquering led to the same.
Yes, one must be patient with such ideas, not embarrassed by them.
Waiting on people, of course, is largely passive.  Is there poetry in tending bar somehow?  There would be if it were a pub on some West Coast, or no, maybe not.  Is there nature in it, like farming?
Start the day with strange thoughts, the mind grasping for words.

The person who earned money for reviewing my book for Kirkus made some observation, related to a sneer, that my character thinks idly about these great writers and poets but that nothing comes of it, ha ha ha.  There's even a line in the book, about the college kid who conceives of himself as the town's unknown poet, eventually laughed down by said critic to leave it a rather miserable and naked statement about a human being, whom we actually might have some sympathy for, come to think of it.  (Nothing is simple, at least in good writing.)  My thoughts on the matter, as always, is that poetry is, first and foremost, a mode of thought.  Get into that mode, sensitively enough, and the words will work themselves out, at least if you entertain reading them in a certain way.  (Maybe it helps if you are told first, by an authority, 'this is a poem.')  Poetry is, after all, what a lot of the Old and New Testament fall into, the mode, as seen in Psalms, for instance.  It's there if you look for it;  it sets the text free.

It takes the poet, or the artist, to see into corners missed, or to noticed what is deprived of us for being the way we are, to finely notice something about an individual we do not know as well as we might think we do.

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