I.
Freedom: a great concept
but nobody knows what
to do with it.
II.
Suppose there were a law
forbidding travel to Nebraska?
That would be a bad thing,
even if you didn't want to go to Nebraska!
III.
Freedom is about things not yet even
desired or imagined. The highest freedom, then,
is the freedom of the imagination: freedom is the surreal
Nebraska, the Nebraska of undreamt dreams.
I've always had a love affair with words.
I remember recondite and desuetude, I remember
when I first learned them, that is: the fuzzy feeling
in my head and gut, much like being in love.
I've never managed to learn the meaning
of contumely. I look it up once in a while
and learn its meaning, but somehow it never "sticks."
It seems like it should be an adverb but
it is not. That may be the confusion there.
That's a word I cannot love.
Using words well is more vital than knowing them
in the abstract. A word misused causes a hiccup
or shiver in the universe
of words. But only through these mistakes
does language change like a vital organism.
Some think the words are mostly names of things,
objects or categories of things. But this is
not true. Who has seen a therefore or an at
lying in the street? Who has seen a why?
No, words are not names (though some are!)
But functions, ways of doing things
like writing a poem or asking for help.
You would think poets would be good with words.
Some are, indeed, and those that aren't aren't really
poets, are they?
On pharma commercials actors talk
Off their"'moderate to severe" symptoms
Of various diseases.
But surely moderate and severe are opposites?
"Do unto others... " they say.
I'd like others to tie me up
and perform unspeakable acts on me.
I don't think that's what they had in mind.
I know I've said I don't revise.
Equally true: nothing ever remains
The same.
EXISTENTIAL
There is an itch we can't scratch:
Existence.
Sleep is urgent, pursued with violent desperation
and only attained in surrender and relaxation
Coming back to the real poems of Bronk
I find them more varied, more full of a life not my own
and richer than my own, possibly.
They are less abstract than I had imagined,
stranger, and more beautiful even in their abstraction,
resembling very little my crude caricatures.
I like the way he fools you with what I might call a "dullness around the edges"
then hits hard with a poem you never saw coming.
The names of new drugs are made up.
With phonemes, morphemes, of the language.
(The pharma companies know their linguistics!)
But all words are made up in the same way.
I have eaten the plums
I could apologize
but I live alone
and they are just plums, after all
They ask for a password, at medieval moat
or modern web site: a secret code allowing entry,
nothing more metaphysical than that.
We'd like it to be more than that.
I remember cheaply bound editions of the classics, how their spines would break half way through the first reading, the pages detaching softy in my hands.
Then, the return to the classroom through clouds of tobacco smoke; fumes of buses.
The words resounded in my head beneath clouds scattered by the wind.
***
It struck me I could repurpose a particular poetic rhetoric, simply putting images from my own experience in place of the original. It is a way of gaining access to these images, which ought to be accessible to me but are not without a particular rhetoric that makes them poetically intelligible.
I will call it the "joke." The idea is that the second line must negate the first in a surprising way. I have written three four of them.
1.
I handle you carefully, like an antique book...
You are, in fact, an antique book.
2.
We can choose the attitude we take toward life, he said.
We threw him in a ditch.
3.
My eye doctor recommends artificial tears...
My real ones do just fine, thank you very much.
4.
Words can't tell you what cinnamon tastes like
not even the word cinnamon
something occluded, something postponed, pushed off to the side
or never thought of, inchoate, unrepentant
with nothing to repent, something not yet possible
in the imagination, in the bowels
of the universe, something rumbling
in the distance...
Even what we most love and admire has huge, insurmountable flaws.
The conservatory you always dreamed of attending
Rejects you. You play no instrument! The woman you love
Lives in another city and doesn't know you exist.
You are a "night owl" but afraid
Of the dark....
***
A cousin of mine, Stephen Mayhew, who grew up on his father's jazz record collection (my uncle "Buddy") went to college with the thought of being a music major, but very quickly realized that you had to know how to read music and play an instrument, etc... I guess Buddy told my dad and he told me about this. I thought of him after I wrote these lines in my head on my walk the other day. It is a hilarious, endearing, and instructive story because it is something I can see myself doing (something along those lines, I mean.) I'm thinking of being a crossword puzzle constructor. I have no idea whether I could do it (I'm sure I could, but I mean whether I have the patience and perseverance to follow through on it.) Other examples: I became very interested in Lezama Lima at one point. What I really like, though, is the idea of Lezama Lima. There are things I really love in him, but then I also get very skeptical and want to not read him any more. I remember some colleagues making fun of me for even trying to understand it.
Or take my whole profession. I thought people would be interested in trying to figure out how poems work, because that was how I got into it, but this was a mistake on my part. It turns out nobody knows how poems work, it's a complete mystery, and nobody even cares very much about it except me and maybe three other people. This is almost the opposite story of my cousin, because it would be like me majoring in music and being the only person there who could read music.
I'd like to learn the trick of going on,
Not ending the poem too soon in a fit of impatience
or fear, like I always do. But what am I afraid of
anyway? Making a mistake? Too late for that.
"Outwearing my welcome"? But we're all on borrowed time.
Alice Notley say fearlessness is the key to the poetic voice.
That and a sense of the live presence of the person on the page,
a rare thing almost nobody gets or even thinks about.
What are the other poets trying for, even?
Trying to be deemed worthy of being read in the first place,
getting published with that imprimatur and thus worthy
of being published that exact place? And maybe even read?
Achieving a legitimacy that already have (or don't have)...
The trick of going on, anyway, is to get to the middle.
Here we have been going on for a bit and feeling comfortable
if not fearless. The anxiety of beginning has dissipated, and
we are still far off from the necessity of concluding, or even
thinking about preparing for the ending. Here one is comfortably in the
beginning of the middle, not even worried about the middle of the middle
or the beginning of the end. Here, themes can be developed, even themes
unrelated to the main subject. The earnest work of being unafraid can begin...
