I have learned (as a beginner) that one must read, read and read again. As well, that you must be reckless but patient. And if you want to be honest in your verse, if that is your thing, remember that honesty is to be open, unprejudiced and available — no matter if the digestion produces an enigmatic turd. Don’t let the dog in dogmatism and the Oedipal in the paranoid search for hidden meaning cloud your mind and stink up your nostrils. Freedom is a search, not a found fundamentalism. Beware of sloppiness, the dead word and the inflated simile. Protect yourself against easy sentiments (often no more than sentimentality), and especially from the blight of ‘correct’ moral and political postures. Don’t ever wave the flag: it is a shit-cloth meant for wiping the ass and polishing the easel; it is the rag in which you fold your dead flies. Eschew generally shared beliefs that are but ‘public opinion’ or ways to escape from the asperities of life and an intractable environment.
El Greco wrote as a note in the margin of someone else’s treatise: “Although it may seem that the masses have a vote in architecture and in music or rhetoric or painting, the fact is that this happens only when time and informed opinion have revealed the truth. And if once in a while popular taste is right, it is usually by accident and is not worth taking into account.”
Don’t be ‘nice.’ Don’t try to be clever. There is such a thing as creative intelligence, kneaded into the dough of your art. It has little to do with the acquired monkey cleverness of the person wanting to impress and please the powers that be. Wanting to be ‘relevant’ is piddling pomposity. Leave that to the politicians.
Please don’t imagine that poetry is a cool way of double-speak so as to hide meaning. Don’t make of the poem a cheap riddle. Don’t be a furrowed brow in quest of wisdom. Enough already! The poem is meaning. The poem is its own meaning. Poetic knowledge is born in the deep silence of phenomena not understood, thoughts unformulated and fate unknown of scientific knowledge. From that which cannot be explained comes poetry. (Or, by default, it will at least be the sextant allowing you to “keep watch over absent meaning,” as Maurice Blanchot said.)
(mirror note 1)
This is what I come across, leafing through Habitations of the Word of William H. Gass:
“Our oblivion has been seen to. . and unless we write as though the ear were our only page; unless upon the slopes of some reader’s understanding we send our thoughts to pasture like sheep let out to graze; unless we can jingle where we feed, sound ourselves and make our presence heard, unless. .
So hear me read me see me begin.
I begin. . don’t both of us begin? Yet as your eye sweeps over these lines — not like a wind, because not a limb bends or a letter trembles, but rather more simply — do you find me here in your lap like a robe? And even if this was an oration, and we were figures in front of one another. . holding up the same thought, it would still not be the first time I had uttered these sentences (though I seem to be making them up in the moment of speaking like fresh pies), for I was in another, distant, private place when I initially constructed them, and then I whispered them above the rattling of my typing. .; I tried to hear them above the indifferent whirring of their manufacture, as if my ear were yours, and held no such noise. . God knows what or where I am now — now as you read. Our oblivion has been seen to.”
READER, SWEET READER
Reader, sweet Reader — I know I ask much of you. You have been very patient with me, waiting for the meaning of my rambling (if any, if ever). But the longer I hold forth the closer you will come to me until, at last, you sigh in my arms.
This is my dearest desire. I start to sense you through the words, the way they bounce off you. You are still young and so beautiful, you have a curl to your lips, you sometimes look askance at me through your eyelashes. Dare I think that your heart thumps a little quicker as you turn the pages? How well you know me by now! (Or think you do.) At night I toss restlessly when I dream of you and in the morning there’s the odor of your sex on my pillow.
And yet, I do not want to tie you down; for us love will be in leaving, just as it is without end or design. For this story to move forward to closure there must be the two of us — like Huitzilopochtli, the white sun god as personification of day and summer and south and fire, and the black Tezcatlipoca, s/he of the set sun and of night and firmament and winter and north and water. Yes, eventually there will be parting.
The presence of both of us for now will ensure that the book remains in equilibrium. Where are you? I certainly need to continue talking to you, I search for you from day to night. Maybe I am looking for myself, maybe because I only exist in your mind. But I start to sense myself through the words, in the way your reading and looking bounce off me. This book will be our meeting ground and our shared existence. Of course, I’m making of it the bed in which we shall lie for me to whisper stories in your ear. I don’t want to be forward, but perhaps then you’ll turn and look at me and the sun will set in the water.
Will you? Without the one the other cannot exist. Today I heard about two twin ladies in their great old age, having lost both their husbands and the memory of orgasms and names, sitting together in a room warmed by an evening sun, and the one turning in utter uncertainty to the other to enquire plaintively: “Tell me, am I alive?”
WHERE IS MY LOVE
in a big room behind a glass wall
looking out above water
the color of green oblivion
how ferryboats waddle from quay
to fog-written islands in the bay
mirrored in pane the vague figure
of a naked man as he waits
now and then the veil blows away
and a bone city on distant mountain coast
flickers fleetingly
flits and flattens again
to an imagined memory
where is my love my love
on either side the soaring gray metropolis
of concrete and shine and neon thoughts
along streets the trees in a still
fire of fall
a few cars soundless and wet
sometimes a pedestrian with mouth of cold breath
a dog on a leash
a crow flutters by and later a gull
storied debates around the nature of being
and for what will man be held to account
the rush of voices
as the heart bears its shout