5/8  so much of art is a solitary activity, who can write/paint/compose/focus in a crowd. crowds are sources of energy and input, so I don’t think most artists (like most humans) can exist in solitude. did a long reading last night, started around 12 people but grew to around 20. did by all accounts a fine job. 12-20 people.

at Portland art museum saw fine exhibits by Mark Rothko and John Frame (if you don’t know his work check out his site.) people who created in solitude. Rothko had his social outputs, at least for a while, through the art scene and teaching. Frame’s creations are very meticulous.

so we do these things, like adding a trace metal to the cultural soil it couldn’t exist without. a particular alchemical talent. and you know alchemy I spiritual, trans-dimensional. when multiple time-lines are co-existing the easiest magic/evolution/change shifting wherne you are. though you can never know all the changes, trusting in some newtonian conservation that a focused change only effects a couple strands/genes/micro-parameters.

from Frame’s masks & gestures to Rothko's glowing smears of  ________ color. so much is possible. 

instead of altering strands currently existing we can add new ones through our imaginations, suggest, between every two trees is at least one door. every time you change your mind, like going left instead of right, is a roll of a die with so many sides, most of them splinters.

here to spew. to put together what hasn't been introduced. something guides the choices, the pieces of present

5/7  the relation of poetry with time. how the most popular are poems of the past, recollections. and those poems about the near-present when they’re written, but still in a recollective mode. most of my work is about the active present, how to interact with whats around me, as well as the speculative, future possibilities, going through logic (which mostly brings a negative spin) to the visionary/speculative—what if,  just a step out

doing a reading in 2 hours, longest one I’ll have with The State ‘m In, getting a better idea what all is in here. some celebratory energy as its my birthday, as this book is all me, simmered   strung and sent forth.

I’ll get critical of my range and other limitations later. you need a somewhat focused force to break through. tonight’s reading may be a good sampling of community and the network, the audience could provide a fine panel on the past and future of portland’s poetic community.

4/25   this dance with this blog. how can I have something to say, drudge & isolato that I am.  read a recent blog post from Chris Cottrell (thethepoetry.com), fine poet, editor  and literary activist here, talking about the renaissance of the portland poetry scene,  “important” readings. and it’s great for this energy to be about. I cant say too much as I don’t go out to hear the poetry, which to me is the criteria. folks communicating, exchanging ideas now and later, yeah, but what’s being written/performed?

people have networks. despite the bad economy some folks are travelling around, staying with friends and reading here and there. one house series in town, whose title has suicide in it, had Eileen Myles read  (she was in town for a PSU reading), while another had a poet listed as among 2011’s best by the new york times) these are good connections.

what ’xactly is the measure of poetic activity, thinking quality and quantity must both be factors.

places. strata. how much cross-connection is happening between scenes/series. some overlap, some don’t. open mikes share being that kind of reading; some folks visit various series, while some tend to the same venue.

I feel a little weighted by my history, maybe viewed as established coz of duration, coz I’m not much social, but I’m not an insider, not a teacher, (though most colleges don’t do much to spread word of writers coming to read, and tend to totally ignore local writers) operating solo. in my past and currently limited activities have gone more for bringing together a variety of folks, which other than Show and Tell doesn’t happy much elsewhere. probably haven’t done a good job at connecting more with newer folks and factions. have a sense of connection with Show and Tell and with Spare Room,  despite my rare appearances.

4/15  I vibe up on people I see, whether driving, walking or at work, their costumes, the roles we play in the hive we live in, the succession of roles never directly linear. after a day at work when it seemed as I had taken in a lot of empathic vibes/observations/understandings (not in an explainable sense—seeing the more multi-dimensional (need a better word for that, ‘bigger’ isn’t right)) I wrote a poem along those lines. here’s the first stanza

I see you on the street:  waiting, walking, carrying,

wheelchair, bicycle, shopping cart,

long coat in august, short sleeves in december

the style your wear, posture, angle of head, glaze of eyes

furtive, challenging, yearning to be elsewhere, invisible

yesterday in Eugene and especially today driving across town, seeing peoples costumes, intentions, movements, at the gym as well where I had a sense (a feeling, a non-visual vision) of the my belly being a hemisphere all white with releasing. sending forth all the people and lives of the world out into the present. I spread my arms wide so my belly had more access to open space

bodhisattvic tendencies/allusions. to claim is to not understand. my investment in and identification with poetry is challenging to this attitude, my judgmental side is perking.

poetry serves many purposes. some people like looking at photographs of real places. some people like abstract paintings. to keep my heart and other receptors open, to keep the energy into and from the language, what I didn’t know I knew, all this intelligence gathered and in warm dark places the data spontaneously manifests/escapes/seeds a broad swath.

4/2    at workshop I taught this weekend, on performing your own works, someone asked if I thought some poems were just meant to be on the page, not read aloud. I wanted to say No, it’s the nature of language to be spoken. instead I said there’s a range of poetries, some being things that a person needs to get out of them. didn’t say I don’t think those  releases are often poetry.

maybe teaching a class on two consecutive weekends is making me think too much about poetry, audiences, standards, my own paranoia/insecurity. better to just act like I’m fully committed and paddle on. feeling the return of  pessimism on poetry, power of art/the irrational, hope, etc. part of my balancing nature to bring this on myself after two weekends of poetic exchanges. its one thing being a loner but then when you see who else is on your ‘side,’ (more accurate a term when you consider the polyhedral nature of who we are) feelings go all over the place, misorientations.

grant me the strength to change those things I cannot accept.

Was asked by the great magazine (previously paper but now online (like no other) Caliban, to make a comment for their “contributors’ advice” segment:

Recently started a blog (languageknows.blogspot.com) in which I'm talking about poetry, language as medium, other mysteries and frustrations of trying to find a place/ path whit this.  a poet I'd never met before, who I e-mailed  about how fine it was to meet him, wrote back that the feeling was mutual and "You take delivering your poems to a whole new level." more accurately is that my poems require me to deliver them that way. energy and physicality. the voice and body aren't just changing channels every phrase, they’re changing dimensions, by which I mean slightly alternative realities (as often dealt with in sci fi as well as 1Q84. For me its all about the energy, the imagination (as well as being tight/efficient/clean) This is a time and place needing massive imagination.

imagination—what can be made up, out of raw material, pink slime, dark matter, genetic code, what the eyes have no words for. whether imagining whole worlds like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars or just coming up with some phrase/image/chord no one had memory of. if no one remembers this being then someone made it up. “no one like me ever lived here before.”

maybe need to revise my definition a little coz then the past would just be imagination, no one who could remember is alive. as I’ve heard that no one lives past grandchildren. unless something of your life lives. like a form of radiation encouraging mutants