pocket syncopations
step quarter step dime
penny snare shuffle heel heel
traffic patterned rhythm changes,
pedestrian rests and crosswalk arpeggios
how that brass band taxi stand drives!
now that swell of sharp horns,
braaaaaaaap! together then breaking off
a cacophony of angry ducks
colliding
into a wailing siren gridlock coda
the band at attention
and in a hand the power of spot silences
thumb and index change it up
quarter and dimestore
tambourine antics on the twos and fours,
fingering thirst as the back end drops out
leaving only horns and footfalls
diminished accord
as sweet percussion barters
for bitter grounds, hot and black
II. then the other
machine hum singularity plastic bag rustle
insistent tangle of a lost hair between
pencil clenched knuckles, it tornadoes
and caresses the nib, getting stuck in the
wood, torn by overzealous sharpener teeth
the cylinders of schoolrooms recalled,
sawdust spirals released and releasing, revealing
charcoal, creating beds for some small mouse or smaller
mite to burrow and take comfort; return again
a knee a foot squeaky brake pads and
the repetition of steel on rail, the
muffled cycle of Things That Go.
Exultant exit from tunnel mouth back into the
light and even here sandwiched between double
paned plexi skins in the stomach of a silver
machine there strikes within a shared thrill,
vestigal joy of Industry, momentary World's Fair.
Just as sudden lullubied as jarring yank rendering conscious
before your eyes became accustomed to closing.
The everywhereness pervasive, this dank burrow
just like the others as it zips by. Is this
or has one passed the destination? Influents:
human lava, ooze of passengers possessed
by moneyed mind, always at a loss for minutes,
seeping, omnidirectional (cut off)
_________________________
Exercise: get out of your own way
As the energy shifts and possibilities explode so to does the act of writing require shifting and explosion.
Description, at once essential and impossible, calls to action her children: poets and writers, for the doing of the deed -- documentation. For several years now I've addressed, considered, and faced in my own practice the implications of using not only the evocative voice but too the poetic relationship of word, form, and phrase in the "truthful" documentation of our world. I came away from the seeming ontological real of the academic voice and its linguistic patterns to seek out something more akin to a proprioceptic relationship to language in general, a shift both philosophical and actual in its auto-disciplinary expectations.
This battle is not unlike that a visual artist faces -- in a desire to re-present the real, via the familiar evocation of viewer or reader sentiment (be it sensorially or intellectually) the creator/artist/writer is faced with not only the struggle between the literal and the dreamlike, but a million other options - each with carry on baggage of its own.
However, at what point is the audience considered? And at what point is the language, as it flows, and as we describe our experience, translating/narrating and in so doing necessarily shedding part of the actual both perceptually and "technically"?
Discipline is a double edged sword: as our skills are honed we come to admire them in the way we have always admired the skills of others' using our treasured medium. It is not an act of hubris but an excitement at the elasticity of mind and ease of application by which evocation is possible. The ability to use a brush or tool a certain way is here alike the comfort a poet experiences in the quick and natural move towards alliterative speech or metaphor.
All creative persons await and revel in the moments of pure inspiration where work flows nearly fully formed as though we were channelling the life blood of our practice from a place outside ourselves. This disembodied feeling, though, is not predictable. And yet, a certain understanding of that unencumbered relationship to the work can be honed, too, in the way that we have honed our skills.
We must trust, in order to approach the work with an intention to become unfettered, that these skills inform our subconscious relationship to our medium. We must leave behind an attachment to whatever relationship to vocabulary, (true both verbally and in visual work) has become unevenly linked to the creative self and its output.
Personally, this recent disciplinary shift (which has been quite painful, may I add) came from an increasing feeling of being distant from the work I was producing -- in so far as it no longer felt imbued with the direct relationship to energy in the way that now dominates interpersonal or other more immediately "active" practices. My completed work, even when clearly demonstrative of greatly honed skill, felt overdone -- a perception I can imagine as akin to the desire to strip away ornament from the clean, demonstrative structural bones of modern architecture.
Journal entries would start with a few lines and, in disgust, move to this or similar: my own words feel alien. Writing and speech, to a certain extent, feel alien. Despite all these years relying primarily on them, feeling above all at home among them... even now in self-description, I feel far away, an observer, a stranger.
My frustration was coming to be constant, keeping me from work on days the channelling was not organic -- I would write and even as I did become frustrated and unhappy with the words, would see immediately in them the cottony stuff of my training accompanied by an ability to wield a word with ease. The prettiness of the thing, its good-sounding-ness, began to irk and concern me. What was I making pretty? How was I capital-W writing, as opposed to serving as a verbal conduit for life? How was I, ultimately, getting in my own way?
What appeared to be necessary was this: a release of the fear of making bad or ugly work, a release (at least for a time) of considering the audience in terms of content and interest and embarrassment, a release of ultimately any expectations about word or form or subject. I considered the unfettered flow of energy that has been so positive for me of late and tried to apply these conditions and expectations (or lack thereof) to the act of poetic composition. Even as I did so, the phrase "disembodied poetics," which I'd heard of vaguely but honestly never known the meaning of, came bubbling to the surface -- and I knew without needing to be told I'd landed where Kerouac had so many years before, a place where the energy practice and the writing became one and the same.
The above are examples of me trying to get out of my own head and enter a free space of descriptive words, allowing for whatever deviations into vocabulary or seemingly "off-topic" aspects strike during the flow of language, as much as possible without stopping to consider, edit, or "hear" the words.
The first was written with line breaks, and edited somewhat; the second here was written free-prose, and I've kept the divisions as confined by the original space of the notebook.
I will try to post more of these experiments, as I'm just getting seriously into this potential practice as the next step in my poetic growth. Wish me luck, I'd only begun to feel like I knew myself as a poet when this wrench came for me hard.
ONWARD! ONWORD! on donner and blitzen.
