AS/IS 2

What do you think about "difficult" poetry? What makes a poem difficult? Does difficulty add value?

Is there anything that you think a poem must do? Is there anything that you think a poem should never do?

• Tom Beckett conducts a convo in hay(na)ku form with Crag Hill
  
• William Agrezza is in the Spring issue of Eratio
  
• Michael Bogue instructs people on the finer points of door-to-door canvassing
  
• Josh Corey offers some excerpts from Thoreau
  
• Ron Silliman on "Involuntary Visions: After Kurosawa's Dreams"
  
• Clayton Couch continues to offer up his dada-blast for the eye poems
  
• Elaine on Orgies
• Eeksy-Peeksy takes a walk
  
• Vincent on existentialism
• Monica has a run in with someone who thinks that poverty doesn't suck (The other day I had a run in with someone when I was canvassing - when I asked why he was unable to help us out today - the standard question - he said "poverty" - this AFTER getting out of a van that uses more money on gas in a week than I make - I burst out laughing)
  
• Rachael on men - well, one man actually - remember you shouldn't use the term "men" - you should say "discourses"
  
• Brennen Lukas aka "Dead Sexy" wants to make sure you have his name spelled right
  
• Tim Yu is in the new issue of Shampoo - that is just way too much rhyme!
  
• Nils gets an email from his sister
  
• Sawako fries an umbrella
  
• Mark Young on how to build an audience with yr poetry
  
• Brook has a premise
  
• Nick: "Energy is a kind of /"
  
• Bill Ryan lists (?)
  
• Benedict takes a day off
  
• Harry goes to Little Tokyo & all I get is this lousy t-shirt
  
• Jean needs a real job - that oh so elusive beast

*
asking little

I see the strange beauty more clearly
With it’s hardness and meanness
(and the delicacy too)

but it’s the streaks that fascinate me
the brilliant brittle streaks of tenderness in the flinty rock
life asking little

So what are you afraid of?
hide behind that smoke of your own making
like that will keep you free from risk

remain untouched, unmoved
but life is changing more than you know
sooner than you know

approaching something larger
witnessing something
stay back along the edges though

things develop in the edge
The edges that peel back, blister up, fragile
The edges that overlap

Just the edges
Life around the edges
The overlap

"Tomorrow"



The sun'll come out tomorrow

Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun

Just thinking about tomorrow

Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow 'til there's none



When I'm stuck with a day that's gray and lonely

I stick out my chin and grin and say



The sun'll come out tomorrow

So you gotta hang on 'til tomorrow, come what may



Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow

You're always a day away

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow

You're always a day away



Yeah!



Music: Charles Strouse

Lyrics: Martin Charnin

"poets disrupt and re-frame one's normal experience of language in order to show-up the received wisdoms embedded in language and to point the way towards other means of apprehension"

I guess I mostly agree with this, but when I wrote, I never intended to "disrupt". My poetry indeed disrupted, but only as the end of the reader's experience, not as an "in progress" sensation. This was quite deliberate on my part. I've read many "activist" poets, and while they did not at all offend me, it was clear that they would offend others. I was never interested in repeating this pattern.

When I wrote, I was in my great "Zen" period. There was no reason to offend if one could merely express oneself in proper words and without hostility. The disruption would only occur upon reflection of my completed thoughts.

As to reframing and embedded language, yes, these are absolutely the tools of poets. Taking common expressions that have never been pulled together and arranging them in unique thought trains is what poets do for a living. And well they should.

It is not as if poets are unique in doing this by the way. Many formal writers also do. But poets have unique, though difficult, freedom to combine and develop these in a way ordinary prose does not. This is both the poet's boon and bane. The prose writer can simply communicate his thoughts, while the poet is literally handcuffed between the limitations of words and the images that appear in his or her mind.