As I journaled: All of my writing moves toward silence. The practice is a cleaning out of past accumulations. Let me burn like a candle until I reach a supreme transparency. [Not transcendence!]
My head throbs at the thought as I receive yet another rejection slip: there are 1,500 published poets in the USA [this was back in ’75!] … this, according to a new directory.
My first poetry reading at University Lutheran’s Spring Arts Festival: I had won $15 for second-place in their competition with the poem “Binghamton,” not “In Ashram” as my memory would have it. Nor first-place.
One of the jurors’ daughters liked mine best.
Pavarotti was singing down the street.
At another reading, Victor Contoski: “I decided there were thousands of love poems, but none about an air conditioner,” or, “This is my shoe poem.”
My take? Having decided the subject, he forced himself upon it like a flat-topped economist.
The next volume, had a red cover and, yes, pink pages.
“Read my ‘crazy’ poems at poetry workshop tonight. Went well, very well.”
Read four poems at Hummingbird in Naptown. Good crowd, half-Black, responsive to the word, willing to laugh, to hell with the erudition …
Destruction, when a poem takes form.
My writing strives to erase my past, wring it dry, work down to bone for the present, take flame from there.
“What do you write about?”
Let’s start with places and seasons and hope to find love.
Notice that I wasn’t having so many diatribes by this point.
Found poet who seems to have what O’Hara strove for, and in plainer, stronger English: JACK SPICER!
Dick Pflum called late night (10:30). Me, groggy. Wanted some poems for WFIU to consider. Earlier that week I had wondered why the station didn’t intersperse local poets in addition to the national network offerings. I had even thought of writing the manager and suggesting it.
“You walk a lot. I feel it in your poems. I walk, too.” Another woman at Mtg.
Go-Between (III) accepted by Cottonwood Review today. Quite surprised, didn’t expect an acceptance. The piece, the fourth variation on a source, has no adjectives – or verbs. The nouns all have associations and emotional weight. … They also liked section 5 of Survival Kit, the part I thought was weakest. So it goes.
Anthologies seem to choose the poet’s least visionary work – or a least safest work.
Use of chorus in Native chants:
“I was there, I was there, I was there”
“We will kill, we will kill, we will kill”
Writers “living by our wits,” working hard but unable to capitalize/obtain equity from our labor – the fear of growing old.
Thinking about so many good writers who work only two hours a day – or 40 lines or some such – constant limit.
Inscription in A Book of Music: “No Spicer book was ever © copyright.”
His Book of Magazine Verse, with a cover designed like Poetry (Chicago): “None of the poems in this book have been published in magazines. The author wishes to acknowledge the rejection of poems herein by Denise Levertov of The Nation and Henry Rago of Poetry Chicago.”
Regarding Jack Spicer, per acolyte Robin Blaser: “The final aspect of Jack’s work is in this – that the reader participates in the meaning of the poem – that the poet is only one voice alongside another – that the poetic reopens words into an action.”
So here is a statement of the tantric aspect of objective, selfless writing that I’ve been pursuing. How ‘bout that!
Manny G found my poems “too delicate” or “too fragile,” yet wants to see more …
Also, regarding “opening the field” or “projective verse,” the necessity for keeping the meaning open …
“The batch of submissions that is mailed must be consistent: i.e., if one poem is down on love, the next shouldn’t be about your wife, otherwise you will seem shallow.”
~*~
Through the university libraries, I had access to some wonderful small-press works. I analyzed them closely, hoping to apply their lessons somewhere in my own future.
~*~
On 9:IV:76, was featured poet with Paul Solyn … audience of 20+ included Nancy Neubert, Francie Bish, Charlotte Pennel, Robin and Andy … Bonnie, walking in late from a yoga class, said the “feeling was exactly the same” …
Pfingston later wondered if it was actually one long piece. I had conceived of it as a yoga class. Need more humor, though. He perceived autobiographical development.
Pflum found new depth in my work, finding an intellect at work in the longer presentation that didn’t appear in the shorter readings.
Betty Q. found the reading full of incredible visual minutia. She also felt I had done everything I could in Bloomington and was now moving in different directions – in my experience, expression, and geography.
Several people said they most enjoyed the poems they had previously seen or heard. Perhaps I should repeat the micro-poems three times each, like a chant or circular work.
Kat suggested more patter, thought I read too long (35 minutes), didn’t like me sitting in half-lotus(!) (too hard to see), though I found it more concentrated and closer to my work – no mic in the way.
In assembling an extended reading, an unanticipated voice emerged. Not the Snyder or Brautigan or Bly, but wholly my own, somehow not the silver I had feared but a sense of craft and, more important, emotion or life or of watching a nearly indefinite sense of my existence emerge in dimensions … not my mind but my heart and feelings emerging truer, in the whole, in ways I couldn’t have known if asked … expression
Betty is right, it is time to move on, though I don’t know where or how.
Pound: “Only emotion endures.” And, “Nothing counts but the quality of the emotion.”
Carlos Williams: “When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you,” it has “an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”
Creeley: Writing is an act [or a way] of discovering … Poems have been about the same matters for 20,000 or 30,000 years.
Curiously, I began delving into poetry and journaling when Nikki and I were breaking up, a time of intense emotions, when my writing needed to spit out in more powerful or sappy, less thought-out or rounded out expressions that I had previously worked.
[In retrospect, I see how much of looking for my problem instead looked at the problemed society in the larger society around me …]
During that period I discovered shorter forms: Brautigan and Borges, then Creeley’s Pieces, often untitled, Tom Clark’s Stones, Snyder, Saroyan. Here I was writing headlines for a living – short, tense, accurate use of words. Only later did I turn to longer forms [often cobbling together shorter bits!]
I admire Creeley’s one-sitting draft, but find after keeping most of the original I hone it later into something much more compact. And to think he dropped out of Harvard.
Reading at the Hummingbird, Jerod Carter’s comment, “I enjoyed your poems. They have a marvelous [wonderful?] delicacy, almost Oriental.” … Somehow, I wished they were stronger.
Two of my poems were accepted by the Bloomington Poetry in Public Places project.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 