It's interesting what you can learn from TV and how it allows you to let go and find something else that was always inside you. I've been watching episode after episode of the TV show called Breaking Bad and if you are not familiar with the show I suggest you stop reading this and start by watching season one, episode one. Don't worry this blog will be here when you get back. As for the admirers of this show not only is the writing excellent but the many things Bryan Cranston needs to be in this role is astonishing. He takes on a new personality every episode combined with the multiple ones he's infected us with already. It's a beautiful tragic metamorphosis that is a pleasure to watch...kind of like a beautiful butterfly with fangs. Then of course, I started thinking about poetry and how in order to evolve you can't just be one thing. You've got to put the all of you in there, not just the bits and pieces that make you look good but the things that show us where we could have been better. I've really been focusing on performance lately and trying to make my voice and Thomas do other things, damn that shit is hard. I'm just learning about crescendo and personality and if you fuse the two you get a much more cohesive performance but a not so cohesive explanation of why. I'm starting to write from the perspective of the words leading me and I not so much leading the words. You've got to let go. To be all things, you've got to let go.
ONE VOWEL SHY OF A MIRACLE: why i don't attend (Y)AWP
George Wallace on AWP.
Read MoreRAGE FOR DISORDER: Loving The (Not So) Mean Streets of Manhattan
“you don't run from a bear because you're afraid; you're afraid because you run from a bear” The urban experience is an untidy one, full of contradictions. Thrills, dangers, bewilderments and enticements. Brutal confrontation and studied disinterest. Sometimes it hides what it possesses, lazes about boring and blind. Other times it can just explode in your face.
“Like a pig in a burlap sack,” said my North Carolina friend Otis Jernigan, who knew of such matters, on his one and only visit to Manhattan. “You know something's going on inside but you can't quite put your finger on it -- then wham! This town can just rip right through the burlap and tear you up.”
Otis Jernigan was a pretty smart guy and, I suppose, he was going for the ‘gotta have street smarts’ thing. However, nothing bad happened to Otis while he was in New York.
Otis Jernigan went away thinking he now knew something he didn't previously know. I think he just confirmed some predetermined ‘thank God I'm a country boy’ point of view about New York City that he‘d brought along with him.
It goes the other way, too.
Some city people run away from the urban experience -- thinking they're going to find some imaginary Key West where it’s possible to satisfy their blessedly anal ‘rage for order,’ the kind insurance company executive (and poet) Wallace Stevens championed.
I suppose that’s attractive to some. If you can just get all the elements in line and under control, you will have won at the human game. But me, I think there’s a rage for disorder in a lot of us, simmering or rash, that keeps us coming back to the city.
One guy who comes to mind is Peter Orlovsky, who used to preach about vegetarianism on that Cherry Valley farm he and Ginsberg ran upstate. Those in the know will tell you that Orlovsky wasn’t averse to sneaking out on occasion for a midnight hamburger run to NYC.
One way or another, the urban experience can be a two-faced, bi-polar, multifaced animal of major proportions. But it's also “an outrage, a spectacle, an emblem of human ingenuity that seems frankly superhuman,” like Saul Bellows said.
Bellows was also a very smart guy.
So was William James, Henry James' big brother. Returning home in 1907 to his native Manhattan after a lifetime traveling in the highest intellectual circles of America and Europe, he stepped out onto the mean streets of New York City and declared himself gob-smacked with the “courage, the heaven scaling audacity of it all… the great pulses and bounds of progress (which) give a kind of drumming background of life.”
“In the center of the cyclone, I caught the pulse
of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated
with it, and found it simply magnificent.”
William James wasn’t talking smack when he said that. He was a pretty smart guy. He grew up with folks like Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau at the dinner table. He was educated in England, Switzerland, Germany and France. He taught at Harvard for thirty years. He mentored Teddy Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein and WEB DuBois.
Heck, he was the father of American Psychology.
William even told his kid brother Henry -- that's right, the novelist Henry James -- to stop with all the drawing room tedium, and write a book with ‘vigor and decisiveness of plot… and absolute straightness of style.’
Gotta like that kind of talk.
Truth, said old William James, is 'what happens to an idea,' it isn’t ‘an inert static relation.’ Another way of putting that is, truth's the outcome of what you do to things, and what things do to you.
When it comes to love and fear, the truth of any experience -- even New York -- is what happens to you when you’re in the middle of it, not what you predetermine it to be. That’s why you don’t run away from a bear -- or a city -- without a good solid reason for it.
You're not supposed to go in being afraid of it. You don't poke it in the nose, either.
goodbye goodbye blue monday...
Read some poems yesterday at "Goodbye Blue Monday" in Brooklyn. It was one of Puma Perl's DDay production readings. It included Jane Lecroy, Aimee Herman, AI Firefly and yours truly. There was some weird energy there but all the artists shined in there own way.....Aimee Herman read a great long poem about "going down" which made me wish she was straight just for one night. Mrs. Lecroy has a vocal range of a phoenix rising and than crashing into a field of dead lillies and i could have been better. Lost my breath a few times but which one of us in the poetry community hasn't?
Whisperin' to the wind we await your call
your poems your monologues your sunsets your ability to pen to page and rise again
through that in which we find you
the most.
It's hard knowing where to begin because you're never quite sure where it ended. This bold new venture Jane, Brant, George, and myself are undertaking already feels so family like with Kat Georges helping with logo design and other friends helping set up our website it feels bigger than that and wider and larger as it feels as if we've all grown together as writers through our travels and we've made so many new friends that it feels great to be able to share this new press with you and hopefully let your art and your craft shine through.
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