Incomplete thoughts 

with garnished evidence of the Kali Yuga

 

Nov 30, 2002

Readership is down, writership is down.  3:20 a.m., tomorrow I find out if I still have a job . 

I haven't written a poem in a long time. Years to be less imprecise.  Let me clear things: I never filled in poet under occupation, but like most people in their 20's I dabbled in verse, and probably like most people in their 30's I gave it up.  Buk quoted Huxley and I paraphrase, anyone can be a genius at 20,  at 50 it takes some doing. 

What is the relationship one has to life when a poem arises? Or rather,  in what state of mind does one needs to be in to write a poem?  The life one leads directly corresponds to the states of mind you allow yourself,  and more importantly, for those of us that can choose, we choose the life that insures that those mind states remain within the boundaries of  what we are comfortable with.  

Death in that corner, and me on the opposite. 

And that is an obvious boundary, along with:  pain, the fear of unknown, death and death, but what is often ignored by me is the opposite: joy, euphoria, pleasure, because those can be frighteningly irrational.

I will leave it here: 

    poetry requires a bit of irrationality, if not a lot.

Jan 24:

"'I love you' is always a quotation" Janette Winterson: Written On the Body

"All that is mortal, is but a symbol", Goethe, Faust.

First there was the sound then the word and then meaning.  The senario is: You say I love you, to your partner for years and then one day, you meet someone else, and what you thought was love was but a hint compared what you feel for this new person. What you thought was love was not. 

Such is the case for me, with so many words that poets use. They say "life", "love", "air", "passion", the names of flowers but all those words are skeletons to me, and my life seems to be a search for those experiences that would change my definitions. 

Back to the writing: link