Let me be perfectly clear.
I love words. I love what they do to me, and sometimes I love what I do to them. The pursuit of them, mine and those written by others, has been the defining feature of my life. Feeding on them, and being fed by them. Hunting, and being the prey. They remain the only tools at my disposal, even as I begin this work of going beyond them. This idea I've decided to implement, the beginning of a need to lift off of the page, or to turn it over the way one opens a door, to see what is behind words and to get rid of them as the middleman, requires me to use them. This is a complete contradiction that must be resolved. Ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm a contradictory person, and here is the point where I begin to resolve both of these problems--the personal and the artistic, the word needing to be freed from the page and the self needing to be freed from the net of words.
The idea, simply, is to live the poem. To remove the artificial construct that we rely on to explain ourselves, to understand what is around us, to experience our feelings, to live in a world that seems senseless at best and insane more often than senseless, this construct that does nothing but place a veil between us and the truth. Words have been the best vehicle we've built to drive us to the truth up to this moment, and the poem has been the sleekest and most powerful of those vehicles--built for economy and speed, aerodynamic, an engine thrumming as we race to an encounter we hope will be more intense, more real, closer to the bone than those we experience in everyday life. We hope to meet, and be met, and as Miller Williams said, "The poem in print is the ground on which the meeting takes place."
This is true, and yet it isn't true enough. The poem as meeting-ground, as vehicle, places us at one remove from the impulse that brought us to poetry in the first place. There must be a way to go beyond that, to a place where we are united with truth, where we don't need the machine of poetry to cross that distance, where there is no distance at all and we are the locus of energy, no longer struggling to express who we are, but embodying that expression ourselves.
Many others have come to the meeting-ground. I have met them there, I meet them there still, in the open square, at the fork in the road, alleys, churches, the crossroads. Some have reached out a hand in greeting, asking us to join. Some have torn a few holes in the veil. I'll begin with a few of them, because there must be a beginning, and we could do worse than listen to the voices of those who have gotten close to completing the work I'm starting.
I love words. I love what they do to me, and sometimes I love what I do to them. The pursuit of them, mine and those written by others, has been the defining feature of my life. Feeding on them, and being fed by them. Hunting, and being the prey. They remain the only tools at my disposal, even as I begin this work of going beyond them. This idea I've decided to implement, the beginning of a need to lift off of the page, or to turn it over the way one opens a door, to see what is behind words and to get rid of them as the middleman, requires me to use them. This is a complete contradiction that must be resolved. Ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm a contradictory person, and here is the point where I begin to resolve both of these problems--the personal and the artistic, the word needing to be freed from the page and the self needing to be freed from the net of words.
The idea, simply, is to live the poem. To remove the artificial construct that we rely on to explain ourselves, to understand what is around us, to experience our feelings, to live in a world that seems senseless at best and insane more often than senseless, this construct that does nothing but place a veil between us and the truth. Words have been the best vehicle we've built to drive us to the truth up to this moment, and the poem has been the sleekest and most powerful of those vehicles--built for economy and speed, aerodynamic, an engine thrumming as we race to an encounter we hope will be more intense, more real, closer to the bone than those we experience in everyday life. We hope to meet, and be met, and as Miller Williams said, "The poem in print is the ground on which the meeting takes place."
This is true, and yet it isn't true enough. The poem as meeting-ground, as vehicle, places us at one remove from the impulse that brought us to poetry in the first place. There must be a way to go beyond that, to a place where we are united with truth, where we don't need the machine of poetry to cross that distance, where there is no distance at all and we are the locus of energy, no longer struggling to express who we are, but embodying that expression ourselves.
Many others have come to the meeting-ground. I have met them there, I meet them there still, in the open square, at the fork in the road, alleys, churches, the crossroads. Some have reached out a hand in greeting, asking us to join. Some have torn a few holes in the veil. I'll begin with a few of them, because there must be a beginning, and we could do worse than listen to the voices of those who have gotten close to completing the work I'm starting.
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