3/10  thinking I’m caught up in the notion of higher art, things that last longer than my body will. yeah it’s kind of a crap shoot of who gets remembered and who doesn’t. How easily would it have been for a woman living in solitude over 200 years ago, writing oddly compressed, short, often not rhyming poems to never have a reader outside of a couple friends. I’ve thought that who the “great” artists are is another indicator of  which dimension we’re in—there is another world almost exactly like outs except no one ever heard of Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne is only known as the husband of the greatest novelist of that time.

all arts are practiced with a wide degree of skill and creative, take guitar playing for example, the poetic range from hallmark to Whitman, doodles in the margins to van gogh.

so write it, please myself with what’s there, and have no further expectations.

but I keep doing it of habit, of pain, commitment. and days like last sunday when I read at powell’s on hawthorne. first beautiful weekend of the year but still had  fine crowd. jim grabill read first and enthralled the folks. my energy was high, I had real sharp consciousness of what I was doing, as if saying these words the first time. got a lot of good feedback, stimulating peoples brains, language centers, the parts that keep the beat.

.

3/9   A world aswirl of politics—the Republican primaries will be going on for 3 months or so! then we get bombarded increasingly til november. all the better to stop thinking about that and immerse in words.

     participating in the cascadia poetry festival in seattle in a just over 2 weeks (http://splab.org/cascadia/)  which is a  regional conference, exploring the culture of,  I’ll be one of 5 or 6 making remarks in two events about cascadian culture, which I’m having thoughts about, though mine tend more to thoughts of the spirit(s) of a region and not quite ‘culture.’ I figure I’m there to represent my way of bringing language forth (don’t know all of the writers but those I do I’m at least a little to the linguistic/spacial left of) as well as the sole Oregonian (not even native) on the “faculty.” in this Cascadia  part of oregon is the south end.

     I am influenced by place. place has something to say. if I lived somewhere entirely different I think my writing would only be different because of how my life would be different—climate, urbanity, economics, social network—not in how the place directly affected my poetic parts (wherever they might be.) If the other changes in my life in a new place didn’t debilitate my ability to write poetry, I could write anywhere, things would change—subjects, references, might not be as much rain in this new place, etc.—but my angle of approach would not—that’s part of me..

     it’s very important to be tuned into your physical environment, but it shouldn’t make one exclusionary or defining, we don’t write that way here. regional writing often implies writing about the region which usually means being representational, re-creating an experience. not what I do. still with the rain in my poems the city in my poems, the trees, the cultural multi-ism of portland and oregon I am of here. been active in the local scene for a good while—poet, reading host, publisher and performer.

     here isn’t everything. everything can possibly be here (maybe not all at once.)

3/5    a list, a litany, variety of perspectives:

No Soup

theres no soup like dead soup, aged soup,

soup buried in the yard and working its way back to the kitchen.

soup you can’t resist. alphabet soup with over 30 letters. courage soup,

soup flavored only with things you’ve never tasted.

soup in a shot glass, an aquarium, in the middle of a double pane window,

ant colony drowned in soup

soup frozen in ripples like corduroy, silky, wooly,

soup without anything natural. used soup, vintage soup,

a different soup for every room in the house.

soup mosquitoes hate.  a soup only my grandma could make.

revolving door soup, loud as a helicopter soup,

when I slurp it sounds like snapping a shotgun

eating soup with chopsticks, using only bread, a glass straw,

pressing my face in the cool enough soup.

this soup is slow motion, cubistic animation,

everything machined into pinhead sized pieces

and the glass bowl is a snow-globe telling my future,

answering my questions as every spoonful is another day

3/4  My wife Melba is out of town so I’m listening to the news while reading some other news, then thinking of this blog and questions of relevance. but what can we do about all the shit coming down as only partially revealed in the news?

     you can’t beat science with science. and what is science anyway but the most powerful belief system. probably belief has nothing to do with it. we are part and parcel, made of the same stuff as this dimension we call a universe. here (or should I say here/now. here is so attached to where, to place; but when we are at a place is just as important.) gravity pulls us toward the earth’s center, time only goes in one direction—but are those the only options?

     Buddhism and other mystical traditions/perceptions can say all about us is illusion (and we are part of it.) quanta of realities, higher and lower states that can at times interlap. at its simplest our reality is a constant battle between good and evil, energy and entropy, plus and minus. if news and other realities can get you in harmony with their downcast messages, that negative energy is strengthened by your affect, emotional collapse, apathy.

     everything that’s put out goes somewhere. by radiating your creative, nurturing, etc. attributes you can help turn the tide. life is a battle for hearts and minds, for souls/spirits. sometimes the actions of our positive selfs can spark a break through into a wider dimension—art does this, as can love and beauty. the aesthetic is to shine, to keep sending out, to catch the multi-dimensional wind in those seconds when a door opens ever so slightly and so much comes through.

3/2   Looking at a recent poem, how it starts coming down on all 4 feet, referential but visceral:

“like mozart on chinese guitars, what jazz is to stradivarius,

always someone toiling,    bent over,    hands out of control,

the government saying all our clocks are wrong so change them”

wrote earlier how poetry’s possibilities/evolution are severely behind those of others media, such as music and visual arts. you usually can’t just encounter a painting gradually—BLAM, it’s all there. poems are one word or line at a time, with the implicit of easing the redder in, setting the stage. given poem’s length, they don’t need intros or preludes, so to provide such is to muddy the waters, to mix tonalities, to add unnecessary elements/angle. the opening lines give an indication of what dimensions our perceptions will/can interact to/with