you want me to hear you

and i think i do.
you remove the process of poetics from poem.
you say poems are the accidental joys or sorrows and all
the spectrum of emotion and action and life in between, which
one encounters in life. they are the beheaded
surrounded by butterflies. you are saying

the poet is the journalist. but more, if one aspires to the sad
and inadequate task of art,one must use skill,and perhaps have
some modicum of talent,of insite, if one expects
to be read,to be seen. you are saying, among other things,
that there is judgement- personal and societal- which determines
what will be considered. i don't disagree with that.


what you say about poems themselves...i've been considering
this all weekend. and i like it. yes, one's life is full of these moments
which,if you indeed inhabit them, become impossible to reproduce. when
you try, you hold only a wisp of the experience,
and so,perhaps,to enter into writing about them
trying to capture them in any way
becomes an act bordering on the profane.
you try to speak for the dead and call it pheonix.

if you think about it, all writing, even journals, is for posterity
a time capsule of who you were speaking to who you might become.
eaten by the minds of others, you are becoming them even now.


you still dont get it.
what i am saying is that
intent removes itself from the act of poetry,
the moment,
or the act,
or the whatever,
into poem writing.



poetry always exists.
the intent or the awareness of a specific action done
for the sake of poetry removes that action from the poetic realm
but also substitutes into that space that intent itself.

yes, the poem is the child dancing. the new poem is the child
encouraged to dance by the laughter and approval of the adults
watching,tying to recreate her original performance

now and then the accident happens. within our own efforts. that which had been substituted into the realm of poetry in stead of that which was intended, actually surfaces and is plain to see. that is the magic. that the stay factor. that the sticky.

oh amen my brother. amen.






"is what we put in that writing any less poetic b/c the intent is for someone to read it and identify with it?"

you still dont get it. what i am saying is that intent removes itself from the act of poetry, the moment, or the act, or the whatever, into poem writing.

i cannot say it any simpler than that.

and about the validation bit, i never disagreed with that..

however this much i will maintain
that while most poetry writing
is a validation for something or the other,
even if it be writing itself,
most validation writing need not be a poem..

i think the problem most people
have understanding things
is that they do not take the time to personally
identify real world concepts/things
to the words that are used to signify them.
the solution to any problem,
or even the recognition of a problem or oppurtunity,
begins with correctly identifiying what specific
quantities or qualities allude to.

i think the act of writing a poem itself does not absolutely
remove itself from the realm of poetry (as this is never possible)
but just shifts tangents.
this is difficult for me to explain, i tried once to jack
over the phone but i doubt i did
a very good job then either.

so what happens is that which you meant to be poetic
fails to be so
but that effort itself becomes the actual 'poem'.
either way it is a win win situation, but only if you allow it to be.

anyway, this is all getting very technical right now. it gets very confusing when one tries to talk both about poetry and poem writing at the same time. i think it is best to avoid it, save when you have a lot of time and possibly, beer. what you talked about in your latter post i never talked about in mine. the other day somebody asked me what is a human minds primary motive/impulse/etc and the answer to me came very simply: validation. of couse this validation itself stems from a more primal impulse i think, so my answer was hopelessly wrong, but my point is that i do not necessarily disagree with what you say, perhaps would just like to rephrase some of it though.

i never said that "what you see as poetry are those accidents which "writing poetry" can never truly capture,b/c intent is the thing which kills it". instead i said that what is truly poetic is accidental and everything else is pure mimicry. which in itself is not a bad thing. except that for mimicry to be good, skill comes into play. this is where skill MATTERS. and i also said that beauty of being a poet, despite the fact that we begin with the introduction of awareness, which is tantalizing and beautiful but end up trying to find innocence after said introduction, which is horrible and i think a problem most poets face, the beauty of being a poet despite this dilemma is that
anyway, i doubt, but do hope, that you will take the effort to understand what i am trying to say. for some reason or the other i am convinced that this is, if you remember what i allude to, the hundred and first truth. this is important. to each of us and everybody else.