we use poetry — we write stuff and say it’s poetry. this we do when we first blab out in music whatever words are laying around, whatever phrases we’ve heard the big kids say. we’re happy saying anything at all, being happy and making happy dumb sounds that sound like words. this when we’re kids… this until we find that structure in us which articulates into poetry. it’s like learning to actually lay the log over the stream instead of playing bridge.
Monthly Archives: January 2014
prose-ac
prose writing depends on everybody knowing your words… beginner novelists think the dictionary is the most important book to own. mature novelists would ask, ‘which dictionary?’
poets invent words. make a verbal pointer/structure work in your poem and it’ll be added to the dictionaries. kids think they should only used words the people use, that their poem should be for everyone, but that’s because they’re sharing themselves at word-motel and it’s not really about the words at all. you’ve heard that, haven’t you? that it’s not about the words, it’s about the feelings? — and, the only real feelings in the room belong to them, the poet? and, ‘aren’t you listening to my words??’ goes along with, ‘it’s whatever you want it to mean’ and, ‘yes, being a poet, being special, means sometimes you can get away with bedroom hair’.
that wonderful pomposity of ‘being a philosopher’
philosophy is done with words: philosophy is when you ask youself why you believe something. philosophy is the negation of belief, and nothing but that. it has to be done: you have to write a phrase you believe in and then shred that phrase — you never know what you’re talking about, but it always seems to work on even you. why is that?
always, they say to me, you can be anything you want to be, but they never say why. it was never about me at all.
poetryandpoet 