this is just eye-candy, but it illustrates the two-fold reality that we’re both experiencing and watching our self experience and not able to reconcile the two except through art. and, especially through making art. so, i look at this and the erotic quickly falls away, and i’m comparing these two with themselves and they themselves with the actions he’s expressing and reacting to.
Quickly, writing poetry is to yoke to the contours and form of life. to write poetry as therapy, you have to stop being so smug. you have to give up being someone’s friend or someone who owns things. you have to give up your future. that’s why only old people can write a poetry that invents and defines what poetry is. even baby geniuses like rimbaud never really did more than say off the wall things in a walled in verse garden.
ok, so what does ‘yoke’ mean? it means allowing something to control you. and, in writing, the freest thing, what can control you except your own free emotional expression? the harness means nothing unless there’s an animal in the world which submits. that’s why poetry can only be real for young people — they’re still schizo enough to live in a world of fantasy and in the world of cold, being owned, reality. two minded enough to write in two spaces — their private world and the aggressive world defining their every move. poetry is a break out.
but, the world of electric interconnects is real — all things are in motion. the sub atomic world connects us with everything else. but, the atomic world is a fixing of truth for the world-shape we’re born into. things are as they are. in our world there are two things: givers and takers. nurturers and predators. both are externals, neither is us. we accept, we reject. a poem form writes the reality of connected and rejected. depending on your experience, you see what controls and releases — ‘releases you from hunger’ — ‘forces you to eat what it wants you to eat’ — as feelings. poetry is about feelings, yes. but, feelings are complicated — they’re impulses and have no identity until you decide you’re feeling that impulse as that feeling. that’s why intuitive people write poetry. intuitive people speak through their feelings and read the world as feeling. they read people as feelings. they don’t look at your face, they look at your eyes. that’s why intuitive people write prose stories. they’ve something to say about the space between your eyes, and whether there’s a need in you to feel for others. the best novels are best because they define selfishness and release us from the selfish. it’s kind of a trick, but fiction is about creating a time and place and filling it with people and objects anyway, and then making the objects affect people, and then making people accept or reject the material world for the emotive world. that’s why people in their 30’s write the best novels. they believe it’s necessary to own things and not be owned… i mean, material things, like a wife or husband. that’s why most fiction is boring for old people. things aren’t that simple. the writing out works as an explanation for the author. the author maybe gets fame and a check. but, the author hasn’t really changed at all. she or he acquired a book. how not cringy is it to re-read your own novel or story?
that’s why old people write their best novel when they’re over 60. they know what they want. they don’t know what’s real or what life really is about, but they know what they wished they’d had had more of. And, it’s never love, for a novelist. the love in a novel is self-love and the author is the most fascinating person in the room… the manipulator and creator of his or her own entertainment and revenge. i don’t like novels. i like reading biographies about authors and their friends a lot though. they’re creative people and have interesting friends and usually have lived in interesting times and places.
poetryandpoet 