2/29—leap day. leaping images. the reader bridges the gap, or can be enough resonance as one image morphs/transitions into the next. I have a number of poems, section in poems, that I’d love to see animated:

“mom slides the bowl in front of us smiling as the papers crumple in her fist

she walks around the table to the witness stand, an inflatable pig

emerges from the keyhole in the shadows of wall street thunderheads

roll over palm trees and a white ziggurat with glinting green windows

zips around the hairpin turn into dusklit foothills one high-performance bathtub

floats over an advancing tide of used motor oil dissolving honest nouns.”

[from Sleeping with our eyes open, in Impulse & Warp]

not that we get a lot of leaping in much of mainstream poetry. some of it is well-crafted sentences chopped into fairly short lines. poems that are more imagistic tend to be recreating a scene, flowing in a logical order.

narrow lines! I go back to Charles Olson’s projective verse where the length of the line was the length of the breath. looking at some mainstream poems by breath, either the poet has very tiny or inefficient lungs, or one would be really hyperventilating to take a breath after the 4-6 words that form each line.

poetry standards. a poem is good if the poet can express something through it. a poem shouldn’t have unnecessary words. it should all fit together, with an appropriate wrap-up or trail-off at the end. these are basic standards.

at times I’ve thought of MFA programs as a kind of pyramid scheme—you get an MFA to get a teaching job to train more MFAs, etc.--with workshops in some cases as gateway drugs. I can’t think of ay “major” poets these days who don’t make their livelihood through teaching.  the 60’s were still going on in the mid-70s when I got my MFA, and there was a division between those who felt their degree and writing would lead them to careers teaching writing, and those of us who saw grad school as a way to have time to keep exploring language.

it’s difficult to teach creativity, and harder still to grade it. so MFA programs usually don't, sticking with the tight discipline that is more measurable, more enforceable. a word that gets attached to my work often is ‘surreal.’ this is a polite way of saying ‘it doesn’t make sense to me.’ the original surrealists wanted to break up the current order, and often went about it programmatically, de-liberately. the image flow just comes out of me (when it comes), I don’t need scissors to cut and fuse words/images. we say we prize imagination but prefer limited doses, not flying totally into space. I worship imagination/creativity, hard for me to see a separation between the two; sometimes creative is used in place of productive but not usually by me.

Beat,  language,  visionary. Covering a bunch of territory but not all-inclusive. As a poem covers more dimensions, points in more directions/referents, than a single word can. This is a good example of what I can do, don’t know where it came from—pieces,  memory, improvisation.

Glass Hand       Melting Face

got so turned around i fell into myself

when i shut out all my senses i float       as if i cant see without gravity

once my eyes are in space     each star could be a burning sweater

can something without sides be empty

go to mass

without energy where can we sleep       nothing soft enough can hold me

hammock strings burning through my clothes

how color is forced into a vacuum       the glassblower inhales

a gallery full of lungs—knit,   molded,   torn from stone

canvas must be stretched in silence or the painting wont need you

i can make pictures appear on my skin

i tried to stomp the fungus but it cut through my shoes

“india” is all i can say       one globe growing through another

can you be allergic the first time

when everything is frozen thirst is a bad mood

what stays closed stays       whats transparent will always change

for a flash my hand felt a thousand years of the beach i was on      

hard to breathe for almost a century

when im angry feed me paper       when the fire goes out, follow it

my rosary of rain   cloud fingers   lightning rod

i worry the beads til they sprout, making my hands too heavy to wave goodbye:

look for me behind you, reflected in windows

each house killed several trees    

if i dont look up the rain wont touch me

no cotton without rain,   no shirts without people

i finally drank what was smoldering from a cubic inch of ash

i made a new york times     a shoulder-high cigarette

the leaf was transparent from beneath       so many aphids i thought it was rush hour

2/26—I’m very fond of that number, 26. 2 + 6 = 8, my favorite basic number, tied in with Gemini and mercury. 26 letters in the alphabet. 26 weeks is half a year. I published 26 Books—26 chapbooks of 26 pages each by 26 OR (largely Portland) & WA writers; followed that up with the anthology Playing with a Full Deck, with 26 other regional writers. I live on 78^th street (26 x 3), and this county, Multnomah, has the code 26 cause that’s where it is in alphabetical order of Oregon counties.

Poetry.  Language knows. Poetry is the easiest art for anyone o do as it involves a medium we all have some familiarity with—language—and requires no special equipment. (Have been to a couple open mikes where the poet read from her/ his cell phone or computer. The former requires a little coordination to get the words scrolling at a compatible pace to their reading.) Can it be a poem and not be art. This whole evaluation thing—what is a good poem?

     I made it through an MFA in poetry, so I know the workshop standards—compression, precision, clarity. touches of difference/invention. Mostly these relate to getting language to do what you want, to express what you have to say. In the popular areas of confessional, journalistic, and those based  on experiencing another piece of art, poems are trying to re-create or communicate an experience.

     Had a great mind-opening from my high school friend (& now prof at MIT) Bill Uricchio that when I say the word “tree,” the picture, the meaning in your mind is unique to you. So there’s no way I can paint a precise picture. One can hope the reader’s experience will be as parallel to what the poet is trying to express as their minds can allow. But how close can you get without pushing it, or even diminishing the potential experience.

     Being the most participatable of arts has also made poetry the most conservative, the least innovative, the most linear. Think of the changes that have happened over a century ago in music and painting. Can there be a poem that works in the way a Jackson Pollock painting does? Painters don’t have to be figurative, and our minds are ready to make associations with all kinds of shapes & colors.

     While a lot of work has been done in modern times to explore non-syntactic, non-word aspects of language--including concrete poetry, visual poetry, sound poetry—I’m committed to staying with some semblance of word-ness (though am free to mash together, alter and invent) and syntax (though often ‘sprung’ or hybrid or.)  Language poetry (“we’re all language poets cause we all use language” some silly said once to me). Getting it’s name from the magazine L=A=N= . . .E, it aimed to break language down to its component parts and see how they worked together, tying in with Derrida’s deconstructionism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. While claiming a rebel stance against the confessionalism and lyricism haunting much of academe, some of the key language poets came form the Iowa writers workshop and other top programs. In a decade or so the deconstructionists and language poets had major footholds in the top schools.

     My playing with puns, switching a letter or two in a word and some of the syntactical stuff are areas where I’m working with the parts of words. This also applies to how a word looks, and to its visual placement (though I’m a lot more left margin than I was in my youth)—the physical context of the poem, which has to be considered as well the sound/music of the poem, the non-verbal parts.

     When asked to describe my work in 3 or 4 words I said beat language visionary. Language as just discussed, beat cause my first non-school poetry exposures were to the beats (including Ferlinghetti, Patchen & Yevtushenko, as well as Jack, Allen & Greg), I am native to the urban grit and the proclamatory lines; and visionary cause that’s the magic, the imagination, making it up, mixing it vigorously

     Still the question of what makes a good poem. More in the next post.

Got through the first post, so now a toast to the blog. Language Knows, the shadow knows, shadow language. Actually, our usual use of language is the shadow, the ghost, representing such a fraction of what each word is and can do.. Since language knows so much more than I it seems arrogance to try and make language do exactly what I want. I understand some folks’ need for control, for precision, giving that a high value/priority. not how I work.

     art is magic, is unexplainable. sure it’s a high degree of perspiration but a little magic goes a long way, like most medicines are only a couple per cent active ingredient(s). the historical, psychological depth/breadth/content of each word is so potent. they have their affinities, potentials, secrets. it’s like the words are trying to tell us something. as if the mind is interacting with the stores of language to make some sense, cast light in unexpected places.

Didn’t want to forget the toast. Having my oldest beer, bottled 1/30/9, Devil Bear #7. Devil Bear is a Belgian strong ale of my own invention, with the name a mix of a fine Belgian ale, Duvel, and a style of Belgian ale, Brun. Sweet but with some hop edge, strong alcohol and plum pudding aroma, I taste coconut, alcohol, dark syrup. Was 9.1% when bottle but I think they grow a little. The devil bears are generally excellent, and this one is no exception.

Another element deserving celebration is The State I’m In, a collection of new poems from margareta waterman’s nine muses books. My first reading from it is Sunday 3/4, 4pm at Hawthorne Powell’s, with Jim Grabill.  Also 3/13 at 7 at Milepost 5 (900 ne 81^st) with Barbara LaMorticella; 3/24, 7:30 at the Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle  (http://splab.org/cascadia/, where I’m also teaching a performance workshop at 4:30 and participating in a panel at 9 am); 3/31 @ Niche Gallery and Wine Bar in Vancouver, with a workshop around 3 and a reading around 6 with saxophonist Rich Halley & drummer Carson Halley. Already have 2 readings in April & a great one in May (3 friend, 5/7.)

     The State I’m In is in 3 sections:  The City in me (urban), Rain is my Favorite Color (water) and One Among Many, each set up like an individual chap book. The word I associate with it is “substantial,” both in physical feel and poetic scope. At this moment it’s only at Powell’s or through me (raphael@aracnet.com), but  will soon be at Broadway and Mother Foucault’s.

     Had the manuscript fairly together nearly three years ago when Charles Potts offered to pay for Impulse & Warp:  The Selected 20^th Century Poems, which came out from David Memmott’s WordCraft of Oregon 9/10. And yes this means in an 18 month stretch I released 2 books and my first CD (Children of Blue Supermarket, with the Halleys, available on i-tunes and such.)

     With all this production I’m not pushing the next book, Like There’s No Tomorrow, fairly firmly assembled, with at least a dozen of the 47 poems needing major work, and probably few that don’t need a little tweaking. Continuing to line-up readings for State. Will be coordinating the Market Day reading series @ St Johns Booksellers, in conjunction with St Johns Farmers Market, Saturdays noon from 6/3 – 10/13. Start sniffing around for a residency where I can hole up somewhere and work on the next book.

     Here’s the opening poem from State. looking southwest from the Kaiser Sunnyside hospital:

If not, the Future is History

i’m seeing 200 years ago

                                      celebratory forest burning

lightning come to call

few buildings        no roads        many aliens in furry disguises

fungus taking years to translate from the soils last 10 meter flip-over

when people walked beneath the earth

                                                       their soles sipping sifted sun

when wood is the fruit

how can we brook structure

                                        glowing clots in acre wide arteries

we carry but we do not ride, immobile in the often rain

we smolder to invert our lungs, to have a hundred eyes

like octopus arms listening to hearts dissolved in the sea

food is the clock—certain plants at certain times, fresh meat

on either side of winter, fish when we can remember

the water already fallen

a rain drop as big as 4 men wrestling

where too many have walked  or the river has an idea

         where its lost fish went

a place only the sun can see

because the earth got creative     irregular     sudden

disproportionate run-off from unexplained mounds