At 02:09 PM 1/2/2005, you wrote:
>Cold, indeed. In my 'younger' days, these discussions sent me running
>to my notebooks to see how poorly my own work would stand against such
>accusations (not well) -- now, like Ken,
>
>" I am not even me much of the time. I do what I do from where I am.
>It changes. Fine. To whose liking?"
To be candid, running to my notebooks didn't happen until I was 46 because
I refused from fear to attempt poetry until then. Well, that's not quite
true: I wrote on and off for years but had that "Little Black Book" theory
in my head that was *A* right way to write a poem. I was intimidated by
the poet-theoreticians like Pound and Eliot, but even went back as far as
Sidney's "Defense of Poetry" with the idea that I was somehow supposed to
write to the level of Wyatt, Surrey (no Oscar Hammerstein jokes), even
Chidiock Tichborne, presumably before he was disemboweled. I much prefer
Gabriel Gudding's "Defense," which sounds like it was written by someone on
a weekend pass from a locked ward. I like it's Charles Bernstein epigraph
(The test of such poetry is that it discomfits) and its maniacal
and--yes--daring use of the unexpected, the vulgar, the incorrect ("The
habitual peristalsis in your bowels sounds like a barfight inside a
whale"????) that is indeed discomfiting, absolutely tasteless, and
hilarious. It defends poetry, if it does, by starting at the limits and
then violating them. Frankly I would like to be able to write like that:
not do Gabe imitations, just say what is on my mind regardless of what
someone like Simic thinks of where I fall out. I was going to say "a
numbnuts like Simic" but I restrained myself.
Now, what was I saying? Nothing. Oh. I have had to work to shed years of
preconceived notions of what a poem is supposed to do. I had to shed
enough of them to do anything c. 1990. I have to keep on shedding skin to
keep doing anything that holds MY interest, let alone anyone else's. Oh,
someone else is listening? What I want more than anything...well, the
metaphor is set up for you...is to become a poetry snake, not just
recreating myself from season to season but sinking my fangs into a
subject, unafraid of consequences.
I'm not there yet.
>So.
>
>Not that I refuse to stretch; my most recent stretch brought me a $25
>Amazon gift certificate (my first poetry $, though not the first
>"prize") and a poem that, while still from where-I-am, is a definite
>change of language:
>
> Oranges
A wonderful piece of work. I don't care that I don't entirely "understand"
it. It paints pictures, it make sounds, it carries me along, and it makes
me want to go to Florida for some oranges.
>So should I find this better than what I usually do, because it meets
>with the approval of the more 'modern' folks?
>
>I don't think I do.
Bill Gates, who is not God except in his own mind, invented the Delete key
for a reason. The same way Paul Bowles is supposed to have defined
"Happiness": Not having to experience what you don't like. I can tell
whether something is worth the trouble in short order. Can? I? Learn?
From? It? If not, it's gone. If yes, I keep it and come back to it. Or
answer it. That's what was painful about losing all the accumulated PETC
mail that I'd kept--it would take me forever to go back through the
archives and dig out the keepers.
Ken
-------------------------------------------------
Kenneth
Wolman <http://www.kenwolman.com>http://www.kenwolman.com
http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
"Death is a young poet's romance, and an old man's business."--Richard
Avedon, photographer, 2002
