First:
In my last missive from Compendium: The Kitchen Sink I announced the festivities coming up this weekend celebrating a reunion of the Twilight Tribe poets. on Saturday Sept 20th
PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION AND TIME FOR THIS EVENT.
The event is now at GAIA and the DAAC, 1553 Plainfield, Grand Rapids MI. (GAIA and the DAAC are in the same building).
A more appropriate location for sure.... as the Twilight Tribe readings were held in the original GAIA coffeehouse for many years, back in the day.
Come down between 10:30 and 3:30 to share and listen to memories and informal readings. Some of these conversations will be recorded for posterity, to be featured in a documentary and stored in a Twilight Tribe archive in the Grand Rapids Public Library. The "real" reading starts at 3:30pm. Sure to be a blast. Everyone is welcome to bring stuff to read.
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Not long ago I referred to writing poetry as a practice, a practice not unlike meditation or yoga. I’m intrigued by that statement. It sounded right at the time, though it was a genuinely spontaneous statement that came to me while I was writing. I hadn’t given it much thought before. It is interesting to have such potentially revelatory statements materialize out of the odd creative ether that arises while writing. Perhaps that is the kind of process I meant to allude to when I said that poetry, for me, is a practice, one that is meditative and may even have a structure and certain recommended approaches. A practice, by definition, is a kind of repeated activity that aims to deliver one into some alternative thought/feeling process… a way to provide oneself with a new or revised perspective… perhaps employed as a way to enhance one’s understanding of one’s world and how one is integrated into it. One “practices”… to become more adept? Develop more expertise? One practices one’s practice. Easy enough to get tangled up in the verbiage of such things, but I think there is value, to me at least, in exploring the source of this insight. Especially since I don’t believe I’ve ever explored my commitment to the writing of poetry from that angle before. Not consciously. Like most “practices” I suppose there is a desired outcome, perhaps long term… maybe short term… or both! In spiritualized practices the desired outcome is often the development of new perspectives and avenues of understanding and participation in what we might call the cosmology of the union of human mind, body and awareness with the rhythms and pulses of the earth, of the universal “being” itself. One meditates not so much to rise above the riffraff of day to day living, but to better understand and epitomize, even participate profoundly in, its meaning… perhaps the meaning of its meaninglessness. But along the way, as we discover and practice our practices, we may be predisposed to sink into language play and riddles, about meaning and meaninglessness and how one dissolves the artificial barriers between human perception and self-understanding and a kind of universalized breathing into and out of life and death and the unavoidable participation in the nature of the universal. Instead of opening a new route of understanding our practice can become mired in circular Mobius strip dead ends. One of the primary aims of a spiritualized practice is that, on both a personal and suprapersonal, collective, level, the practice is able to deliver the practitioner from those potential dead ends. Practices evolve and take many forms and are ruled by many flexible and inflexible instructions, structures, and rules. Sports and exercise are practices. Cooking can be a practice. Can eating be elevated to a practice? I certainly hope so. There have been meals and dishes that have provided me with a kind of transcendent state, a way into the undeniable unity of life… the organic with the inorganic… yum yum. Poetry as practice. I like this explanation if only because I have rarely if ever found or participated in mainstream venues where poetry is pursued and composed that are primarily concerned with the kind of inner expansion of spirit that writing and reading poems have provided me. As I entered and developed my own rationales, habits, approaches, rules (however flexible… in fact, using flexibility as a kind of rule) and celebrations for how writing and reading poems became a lifelong practice, I think I found myself, once again, occupying a kind of outlier-ship in relationship to how I understood… what I heard… in most other venues where poetry and poetics are practiced. This is such a consistent theme in my life, this kind of outlier-ship, and one that comes with its own stresses and conflicts as well as joy, that I consider that I must seek it out… perhaps out of sheer stubbornness or pigheadedness, but more likely out of my own nature and individuation. In the long run the individual nature of my being is, in fact, the nature of the Divine… if I can locate it in myself and live in it. This may actually be the object of arrival in any spiritualized practice and while it sounds… well… divine, its day-to-day composition and practice certainly isn’t easy.
Somewhere along the line I was fortunate enough to come to an understanding with myself too… about this perpetual outlier-ship, about how my process of acquiring and processing information, education and, yes, my practices. Simply put, I am miserable and bored when I find myself in settings in which the prescribed and expected ways to participate lack any input from my own creative processes and inclinations. This was one of the reasons, in a conventionally ordered educational setting, I was such a mediocre and detached student. My trajectories of sorting through and accruing valuable and useful, utilitarian in the broadest sense possible, information were almost certainly consistently divergent from the expected norms in those settings. Thank the gods for Thomas Jefferson College! The place I eventually landed that practiced an open classroom, Montessori style educational model pioneered by Transcendentalist educator Bronson Alcott! Thank god for my own nearly unconscious, even unintentional intransigence that insisted that I follow my own nose through libraries and life experiences and… um… nascent practices that came to me and evolved as I grew. I become quite emotional as I write this, because I am so deeply thankful for whatever forces blessed me with these gifts. I don’t even know why or how they have become so persistent and ineluctable. But they have led me and remained inviolable and reliable guides even in times when almost nothing else has. Thank the gods for the authors I was steered to and the troubadours of my generation, a generation incredibly blessed by a golden age of troubadours, who guided me through the sometimes tangled morass of becoming myself…recognizing myself. Thank the gods for my teachers and mentors who walked with me. It wasn’t always easy to exist in the increasingly narrow globalized vision of how one is expected to participate in the accepted collective practices that are assumed to be the ‘right’ and “correct” ways to gain access to more elite hierarchies of human achievement… even the passports into what are assumed to be the symbols of personal success. But back to poems. The practice of poetry. Despite my gratitude and what is a rather new take on the almost involuntary adherence to the things that I have made into what might be termed “elevated habits”, my practices, speaking about poetry, my practice of writing poetry, remains intimidating to me. I have other practices that do not seem to be as difficult to define. Swimming for instance.
Swimming is a practice… but similarly to poetry (and here is where speaking of the practice of swimming and its relationship to my practice of poetry is useful, I think), as I grew into it and as it became an activity rooted in who I am and wished to be, something that informed how I saw the world and myself in it, I never felt compelled to compete in the “field” of swimming. Number one: I am not a naturally competitive person. This is a topic of some inner stress in my life, but I think it’s true, overall. I never, even as a child, felt comfortable with competition… never really understood it. And swimming, for me, became a practice, a yoga, a Tai Chi. Something I grew to value more and more for what it made me feel like and how it impacted my worldview, my physical health, and my ability to walk forward through a life that is not often easy or placid… internally and externally. And it becomes, it became, a beautiful thing. The thing I do to find and be a part of the beautiful world. The world of water. The world of how all these elements of living and the world we live in are alive in me and surround me. It kept me alive. Literally and figuratively. It’s easy enough to explain that, to adopt such a practice, especially as I aged, that was integrated into my world view and how I moved through the world. I don’t think the practice of poetry, even with its similarities, is as easy a thing to explain. For one thing, many… even most… people admit that they keep poetry at arm’s length. Once past popular song lyrics and some involvement in formal religious rituals that involve recitations of poetry, very many people will abstain from any sustained interest in more modern, secular, non-lyrical poetry. They don’t “understand” it, they are often heard to say. I am tempted to go into a spiel about our educational system’s betrayal of poetry as a worthy and essential cultural artform that informs our collective identity in ways in which we should not risk losing touch. I am tempted to rant about the irritations I routinely feel toward both those who keep poetry at arm’s length as well as those who have taken on the somewhat self-appointed mantle as the current representatives of what poetry is and can and must be. And there’s some room for that here, I believe. Because, at the end of the day, there’s not much modern poetry that I like or am drawn to. Even if I understand much of the poetry that comes my way (and how much of it depresses me and even makes me want to swear off poetry) I can’t say I like much of what I see and read. But, as I have said, I feel intimidated. I feel, largely because of my outlier status, I am not really permitted to voice my objections or reservations. I have no real status, as it is routinely assessed, in the official world of poetry makers and judgers of poetry. Whatever of that world actually exists. In addition, despite the years I’ve read poetry and read about poetry, much of the lexicon of defining techniques, forms, and schools have vanished from any easily accessed part of how I think or describe my practice of poetry. I simply do not know how to speak of it in the settings and among the people who have somehow gained control over the ways it is spoken about. They ways they appear to agree it should be practiced, if what is being published is any indication. There seems to be a fault line between my own practice and the manner in which, in the infrequent times when it comes to my attention, poetry is spoken about by those who have taken charge of how and where it is spoken about. That fault line, much to my alternating disappointment and disinterest, continues to widen. I avoid all of this as much as I can, because it is depressing and pushes against my will to engage in the practice. Because it has very little to do with my own processes and concerns as they relate to my own practice. My practice of poetry. Practice practice practice. Damn.
I guess it comes down to what I believe in. What my beliefs are about poetry and what it means to me and what, at its best, it has meant to the world, the vision of the world. The world’s vision of itself. And less face it, poetry has, for much of its life and over a good chunk of the multiple epochs it has existed, been a province of an elite class almost anywhere it has been practiced. At least that is true of poetry once it escaped from being primarily a tool to pass down through the hierophantic ins and outs of the numerous spiritual and religious traditions that employed it to gain followers amongst the generally illiterate populations, followers they required to build their temples and provide the most elite practitioners with food and shelter and the trappings of the illusion of some special connection to whatever gods or goddesses they invented for themselves. For good or evil or something in between. Once poems became secularized and evolved through times when rhyme and meter and music were essentially employed as tools to assist the illiterate in remembering and passing down, via oral transmission, songs or dramatic works, they largely became the province of the well-healed and ruling class. The very small percentage of any population that could read and be read. Of course, there have always been poetic flights out of the academy, out of the bishopric, the mosque, synagogue and monastery, especially since the WORD was cut loose from its servile position in the church by the printing press and literacy became increasingly available and common. But, it seems, that urge to fly from the constricting confines of the various forms of academized norms and structures is generally followed by an equally potent urge to return poetry to that cage. It seems to me the struggle between free flight and caged submission is a constant in the world of poetry and poets. And let’s admit, poetry has been protected from extinction in some ways and during some eras by being lassoed and pulled back into one form of the academy or another. Certainly, fine poems and poets can be, and have been, found and nurtured in any environment. Poets. caged and uncaged, have been known to gather some of their greatest skills and practices from one another regardless of however open or closed the environment from which they wrote happened to be. Cages come in many forms. Freedom can be inserted and/or produced in a very restricted environment, just as one can be entirely imprisoned by a lack of boundaries. But I am unhappy, I have to say, with the cage that poetry is currently being contained in. I want little to do with it. I am not interested. Oh… I could go on, and perhaps someday I will… if it matters. As I said I have little status in the world where these things evolve, take root, and are practiced. But at the end of the day, I think I have been fortunate in that way. My practice of poetry has benefited, at least in my estimation, from its isolation and its lack of status. I read so little from any of the elite purveyors of contemporary poetry (I find that I actively avoid it, my experience has been so poor and disappointing) when any does come across my sightline, so little takes me past the first or second line or stanza, I have become hesitant about seeking out much of what is being written, for fear it will discourage me in a way that will impact my own practice adversely. I don’t feel I can afford that. And I don’t think it’s because of a lack of skill or even a dearth of underlying talent and authenticity of intent. More and more it seems there is an in-group structure and poetics being developed in which only those who are studied and familiar with its ins and outs can benefit from whatever emotion, insight, feeling, or connection the poems hope to elicit.
I have to say I tend to blame Ezra Pound and his disciples for this approach taking root in American poetry and growing into a predominant way that writing is taught and practiced. And I tend to disinclude the poetics in rap or other popular lyrical songwriting. That’s an entirely different “school”… and sometimes it is just as often, if in opposite ways, uninspiring, trite and merely clever. Though it doesn’t take an MFA degree to fathom its intent and meaning. And it’s a hell of a lot more profitable, if that counts at all. Besides, as far as the practice of poetry is concerned, what is all this clap trap about meaning, about the search for meaning in poems or even the manner in which meaning is purposefully or obliquely hidden (and often is quite undeserving of the energy and effort in the kind of code breaking that is required for it to be revealed in any one poem). Wasn’t it Marianne Moore who said a poem should not mean but be? No… It was her generational cohort Archibald MacLeish. Anyway… To go on— For one thing: I think there’s a link to music that the purveyors and instructors of the current edition of contemporary poetics seem to have forgotten… or perhaps have no understanding of or interest in, in regard to the music preternaturally available to us in language. One has to work pretty hard to excise music from language, but often enough the new poetics seems to be successful in doing just that. But why? It isn’t that difficult to make words sing… even in English. Why settle for flat atonal delivery as if one has no concrete experience of how speech and conversation in themselves, by their very nature, are at the root of singing? Is the awareness of meter and musicality actively avoided out of some misguided sense that it is too out of step with the times? Too English… too romantic or sentimental? As opposed to whatever American vernacular can be achieved through the bizarre attempt to drop all relationship to English itself? How does that make any sense? The national literati have been chasing this desire to arrive at some core and unchanging characteristics that would constitute an easily identifiable American idiom in poetry since… when?… pre-Revolutionary days? For god’s sake, if it hasn’t been found to your satisfaction yet maybe you’re looking in the wrong places. At any rate, that search seems at best to be a diversion from the kinds of lessons that can be learned and applied from the widest spectrum of poetry’s global practices. We are, if nothing else, aside from jazz and the habit of avoiding our often enough horrendous human rights record as it applies to anyone NOT from Europe, a conglomeration of incredibly and gorgeously diverse influences and talents. Take Lorca’s idea of duende for instance: why isn’t that held in as high esteem in the alleged American schools of poetics as Pound’s insistence on the oblique and indirect? I’m sure Whitman, Dickinson and Langston Hughes would have little complaint if the importance of heart and the familiarity with the universality of loss and recovery, joy united with the sureness of mortality, clearly and unmistakenly conveyed through verse, were a major part of the lessons taught about the key ingredients in a poem. Why so much focus on how the words are put together to render such an opaque veneer to such things? I am not really interested in approaching poetry as if it is some kind of linguistic Rubic’s Cube. And this is not to imply that poetry must be easy, but that its rendering, through its music and image and the sheer beauty of the language itself, might immediately introduce a heightened feeling of some kind of connection that compels a kind of spiritualized transfiguration of every day experience and accessible visions of transformative visions of what happens in our world every day. Perhaps I have little to offer in this realm, the realm of what is taught and not taught about writing poetry. But I know what I like. And I know when I write something that approaches what I hold dearest that strikes at the chord of what is necessary to the service that my poetry practice provides me and any who find the stuff and appreciate it. This is important stuff. Maybe just to me. But it’s what I want from my poems… and if I get close enough, it is what keeps me going and what I am thankful for. That unifying magic. That approach of unity that so often seems so unattainable and beyond our grasp as we proceed through the difficult world… the unity of self and others, of my prayers for the planet and for the other beings singing their own prayers and poems. Why else and for what else would any of this be?