[untitled original]

 I find words scrawled in the back, blank pages of my books

(no longer blank then, but you know what I mean) 

my own writing from years back, incalculable 

and meaningless, now, numbers and words 

amounting to little, I think 

but it's what's noticed, now 

I still do this, writing notes to future selves 

that may or may not be well received  

Early Work

302. Early Work. Alice Notley (2023). Here is a delightful collection of the early books and uncollected poems of Alice N, one of my favorite poets. What I like about it is that she uses New York school poetry techniques to talk about her own experience as a person. She never hides behind a style not her own, but uses certain features of that style (or set of styles) for her own ends. For example, she refers to Denby's sonnets. Now those sonnets by a man 42 years older than her are nothing like her own, but she read them in order to get where she is. The same with her influence from her husband Ted Berrigan, or Berrigan's model, Frank O'Hara. When she was writing, she says that nobody had written this kind of poem before, and she is correct. She says nobody had written about pregnancy and childbirth before 1972, and she might be correct. The NY school poets were mostly gay men, like Denby or O'Hara, or men of the other persuasion who were their disciples. Look at this cool cover art. 

 

Poem with surprise ending

 There was a woman named Susan

but I wasn't in love with her and that was not her name 

Day dream of ruining mathematics

 I dreamed of ruining math 

(more of a day dream, really) 

by saying 1 is a number 

all numbers are divisible by it 

so prime numbers shouldn't be a thing 

Monk

 A post by someone on the Thelonious Monk society page triggered a memory in me. I was obsessed by jazz, through a kind of accident, and didn't have money from my allowance to buy records. I would listen to a station called "The music of your life," a radio thing back then geared toward WWII swing era people (who were alive back then in the early 70s, etc...).  Once in a while, amid all the kind of crappy sentimental stuff, they would stick in some genuine swing or some actual jazz, like maybe an Art Tatum.

What this gave me, also, was an understanding of the songs, because I could hear them sung in overly sweet arrangements, but I would still learn the melody and words to the songs of that period. 

Anyway, another way was to go a library and listen to a record using headphones. I listened to a Monk album of solo piano, with a super hesitant feel in the rubato passages. I was puzzled and fascinated at the same time. One of the records I did buy was called Solo Monk, where he uses that style. 

Monk played many of those old-time tunes that were also on that "Music of Your Life" station.  

(Anyway, the post in in TM society Facebook was about someone who didn't know jazz and was staying at someone's house and just listened to Monk without any prejudices and fell in love with the music.)

Curiosity or obsession?

 I used to think the driving force behind my success was curiosity. Now I realized it is obsession.

In other words, curiosity--narrowly channeled. 

Dream of proposition

 A woman I had once known and been attracted to was here in town. I was showing her some articles that could have been of mutual interest, about a poet we had both worked on. I went back to the first classroom where I had left my keys in the overcoat, then went to my office. She came there and I asked her how long she was going to be in town. "Only a few more hours." Then she said if I knocked on her door before she left, "I can satisfy you completely." Then we had a conversation about how a proposition like that could be written off as a joke. I wasn't going to take her up on this. 

Clearly the wording of the proposition was wholly my own, since it was my dream.