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.