May Toad

as a general rules, all poetry confuses me. my earliest writing model would be Robert Benchley. his pieces had some frail subject and anchor, but the interest was in just where/how he went. that's all I saw for the writing I would do, get somewhere in an interesting way. I didn't like poetry, thanks. but I wasn't interested in writing the next Lord of the Rings, and it was beyond my ken to think I could write non-fiction. so I looked at Benchley's pieces and thought if I wrote something like that, it would be poetry. at any rate, I had a teacher who got us to question what a poem was. I learned from that that a poem wasn't just [fill in the blank]. that was freedom in my face, but it took a long time to learn to use that freedom. and the bottom line is that freedom aint. so a breakthru a few years ago, in a rupturing time for me. I just let myself write sentences, in boring prose blocks. sans by your leave from Olson, not trying to extract Stein, didn't ask Ashbery for hints. much befuddled thru the years by LANGUAGE writing but also much intrigued. so all this bubbling around until I just let something go. and hung on to what was left. so I meant méthode above in particular as with writing with Jeff Harrison. with whom I share a sense, I think, of narrative. of a forward energy, not to deny other directions. my metre is simple: the sentence. if written with care to sound and an eye to the balances and intrigues that go on. not to say that syntax can't be messed with, and telescopings. dissonance is a comparative term, right? Jeff and I tend to repeat and return to what interests us. he often, perhaps you've noticed, mentions Virginia. which can be a place, a person, a state of mind, or maybe other things. West Virginia has impressed itself upon me in maybe similar way, tho I did not consciously try to emulate Jeff. Beth's father lived in West Virginia, died there, by his own hand. Olson and Thoreau give me local. in WV, the world is particular. an abundant land stripped of resource. and that's why all these West Virginians are slogging it in military service, leftovers from the grand gathering and affluence society. Beth's father, to whom I dedicate, was highly intelligent and socially concerned. he saw the world, not just what he wanted from it. such a terrible misuse exists. fuck the Republicans, and the Democratic slump too. the land that is WV is an intensity that just about shocks me, those swooping hills and twisting river hollows. b>bejesus!!!. and four square Appalachian poverty, a mean hard life. I know I wander here, but think I have a point somewhere in my excursion. Jeff's in one place, a couple thousand miles from 'my' place, if we want to be literal to matter (and if we understand physics in a flatland way). there are different sounds, but the agreement comes in somehow. Jeff has absorbed his share of English lit, maybe so have I. Keats really believed in that land of Poetry and Myths and the land of his poem. so did Dickinson, and Olson right to the death. I don't know if Jeff is at all as equivocal as I am. despite my equivocation about poetry, that it can be effete fancy schmancy code play and who cares, I believe in poetry in the way I think JH does. method is just another word for integrity, or trying to keep it there. yeah, a little recognition would be nice (holy shit, David Hess links to everything I have online: I am modest before that), but I've lived without it and it aint so bad. it's a step here and there. it's never a fulfillment to follow all the rules.