Notes on the poetic process: Here are some notes on what is not working in my poetry these days:
Notice, most of my poetry from the last couple months has been only partially digested autobiographical or observational material....meaning, it has not quite been transformed by the sublimation process that turns experience into either poetry or into mythic experience. Thus it has not been charged the way vatic poetry can be. Despite the fact, or because of the effort –fact that under my political activist's influence and under my own impetuous – I have tried to reach into the political dimensions of my experience, the poems have been un-transformed and un-transforming in their impact.
This includes the recent piece on my not voting because my toe is broken:
Senior Vote This Year
Broken toe missed ballot
Couldn’t make it up the hill
Or,
Broken ballot
Can’t make the hill
Irrelevant anyway.
Here, as much of the writing this last month or so, my poetry workshop has been my journal. Here’s what I wrote yesterday at the coffee shop: In an undated notebook –but, first one from the other day at the art gallery:
At the Gallery of the Unknown North Beach Artist
How far away must I be
To see her?
How soon will she disappear
As I approach?
Can I listen, in the crowd,
For the voice
That is not there?
Can I be here, Termeh,
To let her be there?
Rewrite:
Nah. Leave it.
So, to yesterday at the coffee shop, again, only partially transformed autobiography or observation:
Partial Transcript
I use entrails
Sorry objects
In my study of utopia
Obscured conversation
In a hot cafe with music
I’ve never heard.
If I’d brought my hat
I’d be sitting outside
In the hot, hot sun.
...and it’s the anxiety
produced in the 21st Century
in a tremendous wood
harvesting a good story.
I’d want to live here:
Excessive,
When I go into seminal moments.
This is almost entirely the words I overheard someone else say in the cafe.
Then,
Biology 801 two tables over
Young women
Engaged in improving themselves
Talking brutal hills
Mention Coit Tower
And so, an itinerary:
You just have to get around.
No, no,
We could do Broadway.
Yey, it should be right there.
Maybe my last walk –
That’s pretty brutal.
Here again is poetry as raw transcription of what the poet hears, found poetry, which is legit, yet, untransformed, unless it is electric, significant detail lacking, like Hugh Kenner finds in Pound’s work, unless it has a life of it’s own beyond the immediate, bringing with it its immediacy, it dies as just so much more mere telling what’s going on, autobiographical perception. Not like the stuff Allen Ginsberg and Lew Welsh and Philip Whalen wrote before they disappeared.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2022 07:11PM by petersz.