Pick any color. The ink always returns from the harsh light of the page to the comforting darkness of the inkwell. The next line is always waiting in the wings, unforeseeable, but inevitable. Gnashing its teeth. It is an attempt to see the poem as a living thing. Tight received forms, pro temp forms for the moment. OCD poets rearranging words from the chaos. We are always at work, it’s never done. We’re making the poem for the reader. Tidy poems, said, Mary Oliver, is the work of poetry. Self-expression is way overrated. Mohler said life is parabolic, no, he said life is paperwork, and manipulates the reader into empathy. Do the paperwork. Do the poets. We must find the time for sound, I thought. Poem is artifact of time and culture. You need a timeline. Matthew Arnold builds the reader a tidy scaffold of comfort, then removes it, brutally, like in Dover Beach. Like a hangman. Poet as master manipulator, or dominatrix. Dylan was in the imperative present tense of what is. Facing the death bed, not to rage, is the norm. He rages. He rages. Do not go gentle. Is the audience even willing to meet the writer halfway? I think not. Poet as observer counting a murder of crows. Reader imbues meaning. Kay Ryan’s turtle was an inside job. Who won the race? The vowels said they’ve abandoned their end stations and have given up their guns for the well-meadowed line. The rabbit died. Puzzle poems and acoustic echo chambers to sound off outside the cathedral of poetry. A prose poem is an excuse to write bad poetry. Wordsworth was recollecting at the epicenter, I, eye the ego centric at the center of it all. Or was that Keats? No tranquility for the wokid. Poetry‘s job is to make the reader emotional. The pleasure of a poem is discovering the endings. Get in, get out early. A poem is a work order. Poetry is all courtship and no payoff. There is no sex, only a lot of panting. The sonnet is a proscribed birthday genre, but only if it ends in a zero. Null and void. Avoid the wet spot. Sadly, the self adulation urge is not to put away childish things. Begin with a generalization. Then get pacific. The argument of Aquinas’ angels and scholasticism, the theological skulduggery of education gets in the way of poetry. But all those questions about angels and asking them silly questions. Then what? Take care of the reader. An angel dancing alone in an empty room, to a jazz quartet, what about all those secularized angels? What did they have to say? And what about She? Did she want to hang up her wings in order to eternally count pinheads onto infinity? Sounds like a hellish form purgatory to me. Oh, Beatrice! Wherefore art thou?
Most of this prose is from a Billy Collins workshop, some of which became a prose poem, After listening to Billy Collins speak, and a tiny bit of it drifted into my Angels playing for sax freewrite. I suppose I should shape this into something or other, it has potential,mbut I am both intrigued and tired of it. Not a good combo. It took me forever to finish adding my Billy Notes, and this run on.
Added 1/22.
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