UNREADY, UNWILLING, UNABLE

Peerlessly literal,

We’re a little nearer than we were.

There is nothing I would rather see

than an angel dancing on a rhyme

or a unicorn playing Phaedra.

I love humanity; it’s people I can’t bear.

I am a Jewish man trapped

in the body of a Jewish man.

I love people;

humanity scares me.

If nothing is translatable, then

everything is.

Scars me.

Sob rule.

Boss is serrated.

Slush life. (The slope of the sloop is

spooked.

The revolutionary spectacle of a baby tearing off her diaper or a crippled young boy casting aside his crutches cannot help to move all those who yearn for liberation, a liberation that is blocked by the cruel forces of fate and biological inequality.

Poetry doesn’t exist to be understood or to solicit accolades or dismissals.

It does what it does, what it can do.

When it comes it

comes, when it

goes it

goes.

This is the secret of rhythm.

For what leaves one person high and dry is for another as necessary as water. And can you have that necessity for one without at the same time sacrificing the availability to another? (And those two points of accessibility / inaccessibility may also occur for the same person at different times or even different parts of any one of us, odd as that may sound.) Poetry’s power (some poetry’s power) may be that its appeal is not universal but specific (not popular but partisan); we don’t all agree.

If everything is translatable, nothing is.

)

Then I came to a pork in the road.

Mediocre politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Great politicians campaign in prose and govern in poetry.

Camp is a drag.

Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I take down one of the volumes of my vast Yellow Pages collection. Too much light. So I go to “Draperies, shutters, and blinds.” But which one? Draperies, shutters, or blinds?

I write to forget (or just

not think

about it

too much

).

There ain’t nothing like a metaphor

nothing in this world.

There ain’t nothing you can name

that is anything like a metaphor.

—Hold it. I gotta take this call. It might be from someone more important than you. (I don’t even know you.)

Infinite joy in finite time; finite pain in infinite time.

My little blurb must think it queer

To stop without a poem book near.

But I have proverbs still to write

To shore me ’gainst frightening night.

Grenier: “Green in green shines.”

nowhere now here [[now here no where]]

[Ronald Johnson]

Time’s loopy as a pretzel, salty as belly lox.

A gift horse looks

nobody in the mouth.

The more one turns away from a thing

the greater the force with which it returns

in the

unconscious.

Tea Party: I love America so much I want to lock her in mybasement to have her all to myself.

We’ve come to take

your country back. (OUR

AMERICA NOT

Y

OURS)

(oars, pours, lores, ore, ors)

Nothing is done forever or everything

is done forever. Poetry often operates

in the spaces

between intention &

serendipity. Or it reframes / displaces /

replaces where the intentionality

lies.

But how readers interpret the result of randomization is not

random; we

project meaning, associate freely, symbolize the process / structure.

Who decides what poetry ought to be? Historically,

poetry’s history suggests many radical swerves from

such oughts and of course much

compliance as well. What some reject as empty

others embrace as visceral. And what some

embrace as rational / sensible poetry others reject as

empty, lifeless.

Poetry’s not about what it says but what it does.

“For where one finds commensurability with paraphrase, there the sheets have not been rumpled; there poetry has not, so to speak, spent the night.”

[Mandelstam, tr. Brown]

So in the end what is comes down to is

Can the truth handle truth?

Wake up and smell the plasticine.