What Have You Been Up To?
I've been out of pocket, just sort of working and coming home and watching stuff through all the sanctioned channels. And not eating meat and getting sudden feelings of displacement while frying an egg.
One thing I've been trying to figure out, which may already be the wrong tack, is how to write poetry. After, in the wake of, the full time working and not doing it before or after. Part of the problem might be easy access to those sanctioned channels over the internet, which can deflate the will toward making things. But I really have been trying to figure out how to start writing poetry again, or how to start writing poetry.
I've been trying not to lose my collected shit, or rather today thought I might because of the sudden displacement feeling whilst fixing an egg and potatoes meal before "work". "Work"s cushy I guess in that one can sit and read Joseph Ceravolo, and appreciate, maybe even in a smug sort of way, how poetry can help one not to lose one's collected shit, which I don't feel like I have the energy to withstand.
Just now I walked to Y Not II, and crossed Pleasant St. and heard the sewer running underneath the street and though about how I live in a city. Sat down in Y Not II and read Edwin Denby, and started to read Susie Timmons but thought how I always treat poetry like some buffet and I end up not concentrating on anything, so I kept reading Edwin Denby. I came home with one beer that tasted like the tap hadn't been cleaned in me. Though at the same time I'm thinking of the scene in the film Mister Lonely where Diego Luna's character thanks all of the things in his apartment just for being what they are and doing what they do, and thinking how maybe one should practice that a little maybe? So Thank You ruddy-tasting Blue Moon, for sitting in me in a nice comfy way even though you tasted ruddy, and Thank You Y Not II for being around me and having some other people in you while I sat in you, reading Edwin Denby.
Anyway that's what I've been up to. And you?
4 comments:
My problem is that I don't know how or why to write poetry when I hate culture.
Also yesterday I read several books of contemporary poetry by well-regarded poets who are well-regarded among intelligent people I know and these poets or this poetry seemed only to exist to prove how educated and well-mannered the poets are, ie, how many different expressions for mist they had encountered in their extensive reading at expensive old libraries or a fractured & abstracted account of the history of interior lighting.
And who are these people for whom life is such that they feel an urgent desire to prove they are bright and well-mannered through fractured vocabularies of weather or interior lighting?
Then I realized I only really like the poetry of thwarted desire (to have sex with someone or speak to the dead maybe) which means I probably shouldn't read the contemporary poetry educated people admire.
And I still hate culture! This is what is going on with me.
Yes. And I always felt in some way like it's a class thing sort of. If you're someone who doesn't have alot of money or who has to work alot to get that money, which takes your time away, there's every encouragement to not have poetry in your life. And of course the act of reading a poem, if you isolate it completely from all the external circumstances, is free and you can still get a library card, that kind of thing. But it's always a struggle to not have the means for making poetry taken away from you.
"And who are these people" -- good question!
Why don't you be specific?
Odalisques,
Perhaps it isn't the "educated"ness of the poets that you are frustrated with, but the infalability placed upon them by your "intelligent" friends.
Frank O'Hara, as I'm sure Mr. Hauser will attest to judging by his later post, attended Harvard and wrote with a pleasant conversational tone.
One must be brave enough to stand up to those "intelligent" people around them and have opinions of their own.
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