1:0  Fillip

1:1  A poet finds his fillip in a poem’s flushed lips. She eats him, and he starts to work, carving psalms, like Jonah, in her taut, wet maw.

1:2  Poems’ lips are everywhere: in halls, on walls, at balls.  A poet who hears the lips a lot or who sees the lips part is a sort of sot.

1:3  A poem: part lips, part ways.

1:4  A painter’s subject can distract him from his first idea, Bonnard warned.  But poetry is distraction from the poet’s fillip, his first idea.

1:5  Poets in their ecstasy don’t channel poems.  Instead, poems in their lassitude channel-surf poets.

1:6  Poets think of parted lips, splayed legs.  But the urge to write, the fillip, is really for the propagation of poetry.  Poems understand this.

1:7  A poem is domestic, farouche. There’s nothing wild about a poem, even one through Whitman or Thomas.  Dickinson, a savage, understood this.

1:8  I recall dramatic poems at college, like Browning's & Eliot’s, but most were psych majors. (Never English; one dorm poem sniggered at my poetics paper.)

2:0  Silence

2:1  Poems part their lips, but they aren’t hookers. Many live chaste. In fact, the best poems aren’t spoken or written, & so it will always be.

2:2  Some poems are silent from the womb, some their recalcitrant poets silence, while others have gone ineffable for the kingdom’s sake.

2:3  Even a poem, if she holds her peace, is counted wise.

3:0  Shadow

3:1  A poem is apophatic, farouche.  The paper’s the poem.

3:2  The poet sculpts paper until the paper’s poetry.  A stodge of verse breaks down at his feet.

3:3  As a lawyer, I once deposed a guy at CIA headquarters. Afterwards, agents scissored the classified words from my notes. All I kept was the poetry.

3:4  The poem’s shadow is the poem.  And what’s the poem.

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Posted February 9, 2010. Link to just this post.

poem, abandoned in what sense

for lucas

1
Our writing exposes us to others.  It should.  It should.

Mention here that I teach ninth grade.

Dawn, and two feet of snow.  The sky mimes the earth’s blue.
                                                            Mines the earth’s blue.  Sapphire.
            I attribute the amber trees to sap fire or to laughing angels.  Maybe a
            stove metaphor.
                                                Minds the earth blew.
Oh, hell with it.

What do docents say
when the painter leaves her lines or
her canvas showing?

Too late to say anything.  “Wait, you didn’t finish”?  ?”  (?)
Patrons ask all at the same time all
                                                          is he hiding or saying
                                                          is he saying he’s hiding
                                                          why
                                                          didn’t he finish?
She

An anchorite just prefers his own company.
Anchorites just prefer their own company.

                                                I dreamed night fell
                                                and I walked among the living.

                                                I wept.

My friend divorced.
My parents’ friend widowed.
I wept like Jesus.

An anchorite just prefers their own company.
A docent could learn something about crowd control.

                                    When I got off the bus
                                    I picked right up
                                    where I left off.

I wept openly along a boulevard of trees, extinguished.
                                    I felt the river, too.

I hide in plurals.  In readers.  I like crowds,
The many parts, of me.

           The Hubble.  A high hall of mirrors.
           WE put two men in harm;s way to
fix a mirror!

2
A docent is not in the place to say anything.
A docent is not in a place to say anything.  All about the article
Allll about it, my friend.

I write articles: a, the. an
My characters are only slightly more developed: anne or better ann
No no my characters are even less developed: adhtoee0e0had
Writing is a sequence of bad puns.  Maybe not a sequence

your freakin t’s back: ttttt

A docent has so much to offer, like veterans
or retired people on fixed incomes.  Your blog could be more personal
          and by that I mean more revealing.

          With all the clocks and experiences
          With all the clocks and experiences
One's character is the sum of what's forgotten.
            With all the clocks and experiences
The sun can still rouse me.

                        I feel what my students think
                        when Paris tells Juliet “will I rouse thee.”
I know what they think.
                        I’ve taught for how many years.

My kids want to know if adults can fall for one another.
Teachers are caged leopards on the way to the Panda House.
            A mild curiosity.  Not enough to get you out of school.

                                    Is there anything left of the old sun rise?

The illusion of spontaneity
The illusion of sedulity

                       The blue, the white thickens, coarsens.
                       Readers always think more than I can imagine.

3
Writing is being stuck.  No living is the illusion of being stuck.  Writing is admitting, not creating just discovering or baking bread with or without a bread machine, heh, not without a bread machine now too late now

           hiding his saying?
             hiding his hiding?
                                                she

Don’t be offended.  Dogma can’t exist
in a poem anymore, not since Cleanth Brooks & ________ . & 87
% of all sentences are declarative, get over it.  I just made that up.  For example.

            & nothing a writer believes would show up in her character’s mouth.
                these days

                                    And poetry?
                                                         One more reference ips the scale, urns
                                                         he whole hing
                                                         black

How can I become
he holdout juror?
the go-to guy, the cavalry?
                                             the sun in the east?
                                                                                over
                                                                                        for rent
this is not how I really think, really.
How can I become

for lucas. to lucas. into lucas. by lucas. from lucas.
during & after lucas. prepositions can be sooo suggestive and overlapping but
they all overlap, really; they
all mean the same damn thing

The snow
                is white.  The sky
                                             is blue.
The poem

Your candidate knew the mic was hot.  No,
Your candidate knew the mic was hot.

but I could write like this whatever.  Docents.  Fragments & ruins.  Foreign words.

Notes

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Posted February 7, 2010. Link to just this post.

the car

My neighbors are nice people and all, but I felt like screaming out the window just now, "Don't mar the snow!"

I mean, we've had two days' notice that this might get to thirty inches and be the biggest storm in our county's recorded history.  Wasn't that enough time to spin around in the almighty automobile?  Isn't nature trying to tell us to slow down right now?

But, at least today, I guess the snow can take care of itself.  (It's about four inches from the top of our picket fence in places so far.)

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Posted February 6, 2010. Link to just this post.

blog on the air

In a way, this blog grew out of Beaver Magazine, my seventh grade publication my teachers permitted me to circulate.  Other bloggers, such as Dave Bonta of Via Negativa, started out publishing among their grade-school acquaintances, too.

Blogging has eclipsed another childhood love – radio.  I used to listen to clear-channel A.M. stations skip off of the ionosphere in the evenings on my most-prized possession, a transistor radio, and I would write to the stations as far away as New Orleans, Buffalo and Des Moines (I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia) to tell them what I had heard when on their stations. They would send me QSL cards verifying my clams, and I would tape them to my bedroom walls.

When I was twelve, a walkie-talkie stole my heart away from my radio.  It was called a base station, and it could broadcast a few suburban blocks.  A few of my friends had base stations, and we would take turns putting on half-hour radio broadcasts complete with music from our record players and neighborhood news.

I later became a member of our high school’s radio show club.  We would drive to a local radio station each Saturday morning and put on a quarter-hour program we had planned during the previous week.  The club introduced me to some fun characters who, like me, loved to get behind a microphone and play disc jockey or newscaster. 

Then came college, where a friend of mine and I put on a kind of Jesus freak radio show every Saturday and Sunday morning on WUVA, one of the college's radio stations.  It was back when the Charismatic movement was apolitical and contemporary Christian music was fresh and, with respect to at least its leading artists, very much its own sound.  I would prepare and give mini-sermons between the music – little inspirational tidbits, really – and I was always disappointed when my friends would tell me that their favorite part of my show was when I read the weather.

Some part of me liked reading the weather, though: it made me feel more professional than anything else I did on the air.  It was probably the weather bits that led me to try out for a radio job during my senior year in Waynesboro, Virginia, not far from my college.  By the time they offered me the job, though, I had decided to forego radio for law school.

I haven’t returned to radio since.

But Dave at Via Negativa is making me think about radio again, or at least about podcasts.  (A podcast, after all, is radio you can schedule and carry around on an mp3 player such as an iPod.)  Last month Dave began hosting a delightful, evolving podcast that complements his blog very nicely.  For me, it’s like listening to Washington Post Radio, a service that must have been on for no more than a year.  On WPR, I could hear some of my favorite writers discuss what they were writing about, and I could hear some pretty good interviews, too.  I can do the same on Woodrat Podcast.  I hear Dave talking about his latest poetry series or interviewing his qarrtsiluni co-editor.  I hear his knockout interview with blogger Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi concerning the intersection of poetry and religious practice.  I hear a fascinating conversation among banjo players about their varying approaches to their craft mixed with recordings of them playing together.

I guess that, if you already like a writer (his subject matter, his mind, his “voice”), you’ll be predisposed to liking his radio, so long as the writer can make a decent transition from one genre to another.  (Think of the huge audiences many radio programs such as Amos & Andy and Jack Benny brought with them to television when they made that transition.)  Dave makes more than a decent transition from visual only to visual (blog) and verbal (podcast).  Dave is a gifted interviewer, affording his guests ample space to develop their answers to his thoughtful questions and adding enough of his own knowledgeable observations to keep the conversation moving in interesting directions.  Dave blogs and now broadcasts from the Pennsylvania hills, and his accent and inflection enhance the sense of place Dave’s blog has always carried.  Woodrat Radio, to me, is an oral blog.

(I don’t mean to suggest that Dave hasn’t experimented in other ways with orality at Via Negativa and elsewhere.  His videos and his recordings of his poems, most of which are accessible on or through Via Negativa, are high-quality fare, and he and Beth share such great chemistry on qarrtsiluni’s podcast episodes in which they describe the site’s visual art that you’d think they’ve been doing it forever.)

Woodrat’s Velveteen Rabbi interview is dear and informative.  Don’t miss it.

I discovered a while ago that I don’t have a voice for radio.  But Dave’s podcast demonstrates that I still have an ear for it.

You can try out Woodrat Podcast or subscribe to it at Via Negativa or on iTunes.  If you use iTunes, just type “Woodrat” in the search field.

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Posted February 5, 2010. Link to just this post.

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