poesis
i'm just making something. i don't know what i'm making. in creating that is enough. i think of it as a fundamental human activity. i only have the problem of not knowing exactly what to create. that's not to say that i have no idea what i'm writing about. the shifting nature of being, the role language has in constructing consciousness, contemporary politics, the nature of place -- each of these ideas shows up frequently in my writing, but they are not usually intentional. it's as if i have a few central concepts that structure the jumble of my consciousness. to write for me is to pay attention to the voice that sounds in my head and to be true to that sound.
all of what i just said is only true at moments. i tend to write first and then theorize during random spurts in between. for example, the other day i was riding my bike along lake michgan when i moved from thinking of sexual desire to the form of a maple in front of me and then to the way in which i wanted language to ricochet around the reader's head and then to thinking about how opaque poetry requires more patience in terms of the reader being willing to give it a chance in the first place. now that i think of it, can sound pull in a new reader of opaque poetry? (by the way, i use opaque to signal a type of poetry that is not dependent on the I or on a specific narrative strand. the word has problems, but so do many terms connected to such poetry.) i have often seen my students' first reactions to modernist poetry and artwork. they either try to give it a chance or react with a laugh, which often brings to my mind a saying of the buddha, that we laugh at what we do not understand. anyway, outside of the scholastic setting where people are not required to read poetry because they've had the good fortune of ending up in a lit class, how do we pull in readers to be interested in opaque (or maybe just experimental) poetry? do we have to rely on people who already understand the value of traditional poetry? or will some people just understand it as a reflection of the wacked consciousness of the contemporary first world mind? will it only attract first world readers?
see, i keep changing. once i quell the questions, then i'll manage a poetics.
i'm just making something. i don't know what i'm making. in creating that is enough. i think of it as a fundamental human activity. i only have the problem of not knowing exactly what to create. that's not to say that i have no idea what i'm writing about. the shifting nature of being, the role language has in constructing consciousness, contemporary politics, the nature of place -- each of these ideas shows up frequently in my writing, but they are not usually intentional. it's as if i have a few central concepts that structure the jumble of my consciousness. to write for me is to pay attention to the voice that sounds in my head and to be true to that sound.
all of what i just said is only true at moments. i tend to write first and then theorize during random spurts in between. for example, the other day i was riding my bike along lake michgan when i moved from thinking of sexual desire to the form of a maple in front of me and then to the way in which i wanted language to ricochet around the reader's head and then to thinking about how opaque poetry requires more patience in terms of the reader being willing to give it a chance in the first place. now that i think of it, can sound pull in a new reader of opaque poetry? (by the way, i use opaque to signal a type of poetry that is not dependent on the I or on a specific narrative strand. the word has problems, but so do many terms connected to such poetry.) i have often seen my students' first reactions to modernist poetry and artwork. they either try to give it a chance or react with a laugh, which often brings to my mind a saying of the buddha, that we laugh at what we do not understand. anyway, outside of the scholastic setting where people are not required to read poetry because they've had the good fortune of ending up in a lit class, how do we pull in readers to be interested in opaque (or maybe just experimental) poetry? do we have to rely on people who already understand the value of traditional poetry? or will some people just understand it as a reflection of the wacked consciousness of the contemporary first world mind? will it only attract first world readers?
see, i keep changing. once i quell the questions, then i'll manage a poetics.
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