2HousePlague

Cons: Maudlin, self-absorbed, weak...

"unread as the days go by..."

Oh no, not another "unread" day... don't cry.


Pros: Nice, un-self-conscious flow and cadence.

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Advice for Poets: You will on Tuesdays, and on the sabbath, and on your mother's birthday produce words. They will be the expression of your most interior truths. They will be pregnant with all the significance of your life's experiences. You will cherish these words and any items which become connected to them, such as napkins and trees and people. You will share them shyly or arrogantly with your lovers. Some of you will never let another soul read them. But if you do, you will see (indeed, many of you have already seen) a facial expression which you will likely misinterpret or, perhaps most wisely, never question. The expression strongly resembles that of a person being told the dream of another person. It is a mixture of arc-browed bewilderment and thinly veiled contempt. Unless it is a part of their job to know, most people couldn't give two shits that last night you were fucked by Caligula. The same is largely true of poetry. Too personal. Too private. Too embarrassing. Too...... YOU! Which is not to say that I am in any way advocating the extrication of the poet from the poem. That is impossible, in any event. What I am saying is that good poems can stand on their own. Without you. Given a stage, some dramatic lighting, and a staff, I think I could convey to you that I am Lucifer, that my lieutenants in hell have just ousted me and that I need to use the men's room very badly, all in one good "Aha!". But on the page, in black and white, Milton himself could not imbue the single word with so much meaning. Language can fill the black chasms of difference between people and between cultures. But it is also intensely alienating. In our minds, words become connected with concepts and percepts and emotional events, inextricably and in a manner as unique as our very identity. Words, much more so than the things they stand for, live in the subjectified world of our most densely coded symbols. We use them because we have to. (I point when I can.) So when you feel the stirring to write (a necessarily destructive impulse, by the way), do more than simply dispose of your emotion by dropping it into the most comfortable and immediate vessel of language. That much alone is fairly easy, and makes for no more than a good beginning. Remember that you are writing, not vomiting. You have choice and control. Use this power to make things. Think conversationally. Tell a story. Conceive of an ear, then speak to it. And above all else, get out of the way! Your audience will cherish you as an artist only when you offer them a glimpse of themselves, of a place they recognize or of a place they long to visit. I'll give Huxley the last word: "The poet-artist's uniqueness ... consists solely in his ability to render in words or (somewhat less successfully) in line and color, some hint of a not excessively uncommon experience."

From here.



j-

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tada!