I Forgot All About This Blog

So funny. Walking into an empty room and talking to oneself. My last post was five years ago, before the publication of my first book. Before I was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before I published, in a haste, a chapbook full of poems about death.

Now, I am circulating another manuscript collection. It's a good, coherent collection of poems. We will see.

I feel so good about my life today. I am a poet! Ha! What a great circumstance!

I love reading difficult books, listening to arcane classical music (and to schmaltzy popular music too,) learning a new language, taking careful walks, corresponding with friends, binge-streaming television and movies, drinking coffee, taking virtual tours of art museums, doing crossword puzzles, listening to academic podcasts, writing novels and poems, all of it.

It is a good life.

I will never be famous. I will never be rich. I will not change the world.

I have, like everyone else, made terrible mistakes of which I am horribly ashamed.

But I am also proud of the good work I have done.

Here's a poem from the manuscript I am shopping. (If you can help my book get published before I die, that would be very cool.)

Thankless

(first published in Badlands)

I know I should be miserable,

a sixty-year-old private man,

whose job it is to mop the floor

of this fashionable restaurant,

a man with an expensive education

and the easy command

of several languages.

But the late summer afternoon

buzzing outside the window glass

has cooled to a fragrant dusk,

and the meteor cars,

their headlights suddenly bright

in the darkening day,

chase each frantically

to the same uncertain eternity,

while the wet floor glistens and dries

like a piece of polished silver,

and I am satisfied with my task.

Keith Dunlap

Manifesto Part Two

2. Avoid preciousness at all costs. There is a strain of contemporary poetry that depends on preciousness. By preciousness, I mean taking itself very seriously, using heightened language where plain language will do, compressed syntax, both typographic arrangement on the page and grammatical arrangement, and a didactic abstraction in place of narrative or imagery to explain/tell the reader what the poem is about. This is not for me. If you are trying to sound important or deep, you are most likely trivial and shallow. The experiment of paraphrasing the content expressed by poetry of this type is an instructive exercise, one which reveals the truth of this general rule. I never worry about the meaning of a poem while I am writing it. Or not much. I worry about sound, form, diction, imagery, reversal, and narrative. I aim for simple. For pleasures of ear and mind's eye. By doing this, in as unpretentious a manner as possible, I find there are often startling, mysterious, paradoxical depths to my work.

My Manifesto Part One

As a preface, I want to admit the limits of my aesthetic creed. The following may not apply to anyone but me, but, for me, it is an ideal at which to aim.

1. Do not write with an intention to getting published.

In other words, do not let ideas of what may be "publishable" or not, what currently seems to be the prevailing aesthetic regime with regards to content or style, have any say in the creative process, except accidentally through constant reading and reflection. Don't worry about what kind of stuff is getting published at journal A or Magazine B, etc., and then try to emulate it. And when Journal A or Magazine B rejects your stuff because it is not the kind of stuff it publishes, don't fret it. This attitude of mine may seem wrongheaded to many professional writers (and their agents) whose livelihoods and identities depend on getting published. Of course, it is easy for me, because I am a poet. Nonetheless, I think there is a much better standard to aim at, one which, ironically, will probably serve as a better path to publication, if that is important. The trite dictum "be yourself" does not suffice either, however. I think writing is a desperate act of love. A poem is a note, a postcard to the universe. It says, I am paying attention, although it may not always seem it. I see you. I am humbled by your complexity and your beauty mixed with tragedy and comedy. I can't really put it into words, but I am going to try. In this sense, for me, writing has to be guided by inspiration. I hear, see, think, remember something which somehow coalesces into something else, the first line of a poem, or the first few lines, or the poem in its entirety. I do not reject this message. I follow its voice, which, in the end, is my voice. I am not afraid of its formal nor of its informal qualities. No content is taboo. None is preferred. If I seem to circle the same objects, so be it. I can't force it. I can't "sit down to write", even if I have a time when I sit at my desk each day. If nothing happens, nothing happens. That's okay. The world doesn't need me. I need the world.

It's Been A Long Time Since We Spoke

So, it turns out that opening a coffee shop is not the best plan for "the writing life." I have been too busy to take a deep breath, much less blog. My hiatus has been sponsored also by our caretaking of Olive, a neighbor's black lab. Between getting Viv off to school in the morning, shop-related errands, walking the dog, actual work-related chores, and work itself, not much time to give the lazy thoughts room to grow and breed creative and/or critical expression..

Not surprising that the muse has seen fit to take an extended vacation therefore. Can't complain. We had a great run the last five years. I just printed out a MS of poems written (or significantly re-written) over that span and the number is a little more than one hundred and sixty. So, six months of nada doesn't seem terribly tragic.

The spell was broken recently, but I learned and then was soon reminded by a good poet friend that many magazines consider posting one's work on one's (or someone else's) blog to be a "publication" and violation of their first rights if the accept the same for print. Uh, okay. Can't we all just relax a bit? How many people do the editors of these magazines think actually read my blog? Do they really think that the potential for buying TINY LITERARY MAGAZINE by the five or six people who sometimes read what I've written here will be compromised by me posting a draft of poem which I will later submit for publication to TINY LITERARY MAGAZINE?

Perhaps I don't take all this seriously enough. I am guessing that I don't. It's a kind of heresy, I suppose. The same nonchalant whimsy often infects my poetry. I'll betcha it happens frequently that that the "lack of seriousness" of my work poisons its official reception. My work does not generally exhibit either the post-adolescent angst/drama of the average MFA-type poet nor the self-important terror-filled rejection of "sentiment" by the teachers/publishers of most contemporary American poetry.

Is my work too playful, both in form and content? Hmmm. There is certainly a genuine darkness in a lot of my work, but hopefully it is not a contrived seriousness; rather an organic appreciation of the transitory fickle absurd nature of the subject. For example, the new poem takes place during a walk along a cemetary retaining wall. The rhetorical shift in the poem comes when the dog who is being walked stops to sniff a crack in the wall and the poem wonders whether the ground where the dead people are buried smells different. Playful in one sense, I suppose.

Low Self Esteem and the Artistic Ego

I wonder what exactly is the artistic ego I've heard so much about. Various therapists have explained to an incredulous me that there is this thing called a healthy ego which has a reasonably accurate picture of the self and one's relation to the world, is generally positive, doesn't depend on the approval of others won at the cost of integrity by adapting to every slight fluctuating sign of interest or disinterest. So, is the artistic ego an outsized ego that has incredibly thick skin, ignores the raised eyebrow, plows straight ahead on its idiosyncratic adventures without concern? There is evidence of that in the world. Or is the artistic ego the opposite: a deeply insecure constantly questioning fragile neurosis trying to establish itself through representation after representation, never satisfied, full of self-criticism, easily wounded and offended? There is evidence for that too. Now, I know there is a certain personality type that is the unfortunate combination of the worst qualities of these two caricatures. In other words, there are people in this world who seek to make themselves feel more important than they are by feeling crappy about themselves all the time. It's the old "Everybody in this room thinks I'm a terrible person" syndrome, or if you're a writer, "I'm a genius! I'm an idiot! Nobody appreciates me! That person who said my work is good was lying!" syndrome. Don't ask me how I know this.

I had this sudden vision of my own work today as a pile of sentimental, cliched crap. It was horrible and I can't quite shake it. I try hard not to judge my own work or myself. Try to leave the critical analysis to others. But sometimes, especially after a long period without getting anything published, I just can't help myself. I know intellectually that my job is just to write the poems that show up to be written. To stay true to my ear and my aesthetic. But, damn, sometimes the slog feels like a slog.

The Complete Unknown

I frequently have mixed feelings

And am divided against myself

Half in love with easeful death

While standing on the beach in Eleuthera

There is no lifeguard and no rope

To stop me from swimming out too far

The water is almost invisible

The slope as gradual as the everlasting

Like a lifetime of minor betrayals

There is no algorithm to describe

A world resplendent with uncertainty

No big data computation to say

How the water dissolves the razor sharp shadows

Or the fluttering wings of a southern ray

Keith Dunlap

Sunday Puzzle

Just the word, Sunday, in the title

Makes me think of her and how she loved

Wallace Stevens, at least his poetry

And of her sister, the forty-year-old Buddhist

Who read “Sunday Morning” at her memorial service

And how Philip and I wept into each other’s arms

Each of us conscious of how each of us fell short

Of her love. What it was for Philip I couldn’t say

But for me it was that day when sick from chemotherapy

She confessed that her dying wish was for us to go away

Together and have sex before she was too frail

And I promised her we would knowing full well

That it would never come to pass and then she asked

What I thought happened after death

And I got all tongue-tied and gave

Some lame pseudo-philosophical reply

When all she wanted me to do was deceive her

When I told the truth and be truthful when I lied

Keith Dunlap

You Must Be Insane to Write Poetry

No one person can be sane. It is always a judgment passed by someone else. And yet, given that each of us is at least in part unknowable to the other, it is a judgment to that extent passed on a set of representations. So....is sanity a pretense? One cannot cultivate sanity any more than one can cultivate madness. Sanity is not an act of will. As already said, it is an observation made about a set of representations under a set of conditions. Is that person's response to a circumstance sane or insane? There are too many variables at play in the circumstances of sanity to be subjected to formula or defined. Sanity is "x", including the quotation marks...

Sanity is the sleight-of-hand of consciousness. It is a mirror that cannot be seen, a whisper that cannot be heard. It is about us. Better, it is the sense of the mirror that cannot be seen, the rumor of a whisper that cannot be heard. Sanity is linked to the uncanny the way hope is linked to despair or belief to doubt. Sanity remarks that all the pieces do not fit, that there is inconsistency and irrationality. This remark posits the vantage point of the imagined self, of the illusion of normality, of coherence, of self. Sanity is this hope for the other, this desire that the signs cohere into sensible meaning.

The sensation of rejection, emanating from a communication that seeks but does not find an audience, that is not contested but rejected as nonsense is a dreadful disorientation. One's only topics are subjectivity and reality. One's only recourses upon rejection are despair or a hardening of autonomous conviction. Insanity.

The Minds of Others

It is what gives work meaning. But, what if I speak an entirely different language from those who are judging my work? I have heard it said that English majors don't read literature anymore. True or not, they certainly don't read the same books I did. Of course, some of this is describable as distinction: no one reads the same "books". I once went through the mental exercise of trying to figure how many of the roughly 50,000 remaining readers of Ancient Greek and Latin in the United States also attended law school and got an MFA. A small number, I bet. And those are probably just three minor irrelevant facts.  The real stuff, the real teachers in our lives, the alcoholic drug-addicted mother, the girl one fell in love with in high school, the death of a close friend, etc, etc., etc., are each different for each of us. So back to books.

It's astounding to me how often on first review of a new poem, I see the echos in it, the allusions, the tone picked up from thousands of poems read in several different languages. One must be wary of pride in this and I was more than a little mean-spirited the other day. I was sitting next to a young woman who has been writing poetry and performing at a local "spoken word" venue. I asked her about where her poetry originated, what inspired her, and she talked about about a group of incarcerated women she met who have evolved a rap-inspired spoken word to help them process the injustice in their lives. This is a beautiful thing. Beautiful in itself and beautiful to be inspired by it. But it also made me feel very alone, like a distant cold satellite in a wobbly orbit around a green and happy planet. When she asked me about my work, I told her that I had been writing poetry since I was in third grade, I listed the languages I had learned all or part of, the teachers with whom I had studied, the aesthetic school with which I had once been associated, the degrees I had collected, the reading I did in art history, philosophy, science, and the poets whom I loved more than others, whose music and depth still was a fount of inspiration. When I was done, I apologized for being an ass.

Of course, I am imagining the supposed audience. Here is what I imagine (some of this is fired by experience, having been co-editor of two literary magazines): a gaggle of bored, sullen, college students, who are texting while leafing through submissions to the magazine on which each is part of the editorial staff. That is the rhythm of their lives. Their literature. Web pages. Sound bites. Synopses and books about books about books. I once had a creative writing graduate student defend his failure to read literature by claiming that it would dilute his originality.  Has the world passed me by? Am I merely a relic?

Perhaps. Does it matter? Probably not. It's not as though I am going to stop writing. It is an affliction I can't seem to shake. The poems just happen. Perhaps the point is not to be published, to be acclaimed, to be compensated. Perhaps the point is the writing of the poem. All of it, all the books, all the experience, all the unconscious, all the conscious all comes down to that: the writing of the last poem.  Until the next one.

March 31

To what purpose, April, do you return tomorrow?

Like a virgin consecrated to God, producing nothing

But joy full of sorrow and the empty rehearsal

The same cruel trick played over and over and then

Smiling with your canine teeth exposed

Advertising like a sometimes distant friend

That winter is surely over until it comes around again

Keith Dunlap

A Lesson From Life?

It's like jazz; sometimes you play the wrong note, but you play it fortissimo, and maybe it's the right note:

Lines Written At the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (John Clare)

What I do is for me, for that I came

In a world full of worry, I am to be defamed

I am mine own sound, but mine sound is not the same

Because a hazel wood fire permeates my brain

I long for scenes where men hath never tread

As my doctor, Fenwick Skrimchire, once said

“After years of poetical prosing,” the present insanity ensued

I live among the ignorant a man hungry for food

Disheveled I wander in the quickening maze

East of me, winter, west of me, winter days

I stumble like a chariot hitched to a crippled blaze

Into the world’s own chaos half-crazed

With constructed meaning, with the simple earth’s delight

I am mine own museum vacant of mine own sight

Keith Dunlap

Post-Post-Post Post (After Andy Warhol)

Andy Warhol happened. High and low collapsed into each other. Beauty and truth were replaced by the image as manipulated by commerce to entice the consumer. All this was showcased by Andy Warhol. The lyric was replaced by the jingle. All pop music, even rock, is merely an advertisement for an image. We are not trying to live with integrity to a moral ideal (something greater than the self) but to an image (a substitute self). So, what to do?

I propose nothing. Seriously. NOTHING. I predict that if one lives, reads, thinks, breathes, writes, revises at this moment in time, one will be influenced by this fact, one's work will account for this fact. Don't chase it. Do not try self-consciously through irony, self-reflexiveness, or some other mannered response, to incorporate it. Aim at truth. Aim at beauty. Your efforts will reflect the zeitgeist. Or they won't. You can't force it. You can't avoid it. Any attempt to be new will result in a mere novelty.

Stop chasing your shadow. It will follow you.

The Speed of Light

The speed of light is much too slow

I cannot let my panic go

Starting to snow a deliberate snow

The speed of light is much too slow

Nothing happens quite as fast

Snow follows stars, follows snow falling fast

The stars imply the distant past

I wouldn’t want this day to last

How time curves back to show

The speed of light is much too slow

But I wouldn’t want it any faster

As long as you were here with me

On this the best of days my last

Keith Dunlap

The Only Cardinal Sin

The only mistake I have ever made--and it is one that I have repeated over and over throughout my life--is not having confidence in what I suspect to be true.  "Not having the courage of one's convictions" is too strong an expression of this failing, however. My suspicions rarely if ever formally solidify into convictions. Instead, my timidity or thoughtfulness or low self esteem (or whatever) prevents me from announcing/publishing my dimly sensed inner thoughts about something. Rather, I more easily adopt the ideas of others about things, because the holders of those contrary opinions are, in my view, more authoritative, more learned, and generally smarter than I. As a result, I suffer from a peculiar brand of intellectual depravity. For example, other than Yeats and Auden, I never cared much for modernist poetry. Yet, when I was an undergraduate at Columbia in the late seventies, modernist poetry was central to what was taught as poetry. So, I pretended to like Pound and Eliot more than I did.  I suppose this is a common enough failing of undergraduates (at least in my day.) Yet isn't it the worst of sins? Better to cling stubbornly and foolishly to a genuinely held even if generally discredited belief. Not trusting one's inner voice leads over and over again into a peculiar brand of disappointment and confusion. It is disappointment tripled: first, one is disappointed in what turns out not to be true; second, one is disappointed in one's elected arbiters elegantiae; and, third, one is disappointed in oneself for having been duped. Attentiveness to one's own opinion leads not only to the dialectical testing of closely held assumptions and perhaps a habit of prudent investigation into those assumptions, but also to a journey of discovery about oneself.  It is better to have loved and lost...

Of course, the above is a gross over-simplification.  Nothing is more tedious or doomed than someone who only listens to his inner voice, who is tone deaf to the criticisms or insights of others. Yet in the crucible of one's innermost thoughts, there is an alchemy.

Things I Don't Like in Poetry

Not a complete list:

A fancy word where a plain, powerful word would do

"Breathy" lines instead of lines informed by stress and letter sounds

Where the poem tells me what to think about the poem, i.e. where the idea of the poem is spelled out in abstract terms in the poem itself so that there's no mystery about what the poem is trying (or not trying) to say

Cliche wrapped in preciousness, any preciousness at all, in fact (often associated with breathiness)

Disingenuous ideas.  Try this experiment: next time you read a poem, stop at each distinct thought, and ask yourself: does anyone really think that way?  You will be amazed.

In fact, a lot of poems I read stand on either cliche wrapped in preciousness (take away the fancy language and what is really being said is nothing but the obvious) or disingenuous (truly unbelievable that anyone would seriously think that)

I am sure that I am guilty of all these things at one time or another.  All the more reason to make a list.

Why I Write

Let's be honest.  Poetry is a hobby to me, an important hobby, but a hobby nonetheless.  It's not putting food on the table and I have no illusions about my stature or talent, except perhaps for the illusion that I have no illusions.  I'm good at it.  I publish and can probably continue to publish.  Beyond that, who knows?  I'm probably not the worst poet in America, and certainly not the best (whatever that means).  I am neither convinced of my own "genius" nor of my own "immortality".

The question then is why I write at all.  Why one writes at all.  I mean, why bother?  If one is not convinced that one is contributing in an essential way to culture or humanity, what is one doing and why is one doing it? I have always written.  I started writing in Third Grade and haven't stopped.  That may be a complete answer, but still an evasion.

It may simply come down to a combination of laziness and stubbornness.  Really.  Writing, I think, is a kind of shortcut to life.  It takes this complex impossible task, living, and reduces it to two-dimensions.  That is, it provides substitute aesthetic satisfactions for the hard-won real satisfactions of life.  I can only speak for myself, but I have no desire to "get ahead" in life.  None.  Writing is a way of getting ahead OF life without getting ahead IN life.  An odd use of one's time, if you ask me.  It is, in many ways, of course, self-contained.  Its rewards, for me, nonetheless, are spiritual, in a very broad sense of that word.  Writing is an exploratory experience which also allows me to confirm my basic ideas about who I am and what's important to me.

Don't get me wrong.  I like clean sheets and hot meals and paid bills.  I have had periods in my life when I didn't have any of those things and I don't romanticize that insecurity.  I'm just saying that, if that is all there is or if getting more of those things than someone else is all there is, I'm not extremely motivated to get out of bed.  I am lazy and unambitious in that way.  I don't care so much.  Perhaps, for this reason, I will never be a "successful" writer.

I like the pretend world better.  The world of music and words and ideas.  The world of synthesizing all those things into something I call a poem.

The stubbornness?  Persisting despite constant discouragement, disappointment and doubt.  Somehow, at an early age, I came to believe that writing is important, and despite the evidence of reality, I won't let go of that ideal.  Pure stubbornness and laziness.

An Amateur at Art

I understand, I think, why my manuscript is not getting any traction with potential publishers, despite the fact that a lot of the poems in it have been published in very good literary magazines.  For those of you who don't know, most books of poems are published through contests, where the entry fee pays for the publication (and perhaps partly for the distribution) of the book.  So, I have been entering my manuscript in contests.  I am fortunate that we have the financial resources to pay the fee and absorb the other costs. The manuscript contains about 65 poems and about 25 of them have been published in journals.  So far, the manuscript has been summarily dismissed, never making it past the first cut, often being returned even before the deadline for submissions has closed.

The explanation for this distaste is outside of my knowledge, of course.  I have no real idea of who is doing the thinking and what he or she is thinking when they take a look at my work and say, "ugh," or "nah".  A possible explanation did occur to me, however, and I think it is worth kicking around a bit.  I start with an analogy.  I have an acquaintance.  We haven't seen each other for years.  She is extremely bright, a Harvard grad, and, more importantly, an extremely skilled painter.  She did not go to art school, but she has spent her life painting.  Her paintings are beautiful and skilled.  They are representational.  She doesn't belong to a school of painting, but, if I had to give her work a name, I would call it post-post-impressionist.  If you just glanced at them, you would think that they are not unlike a lot of work that one might see at a craft fair or local art show.  In fact, her work far surpasses the stuff where one would instinctively place it, but there it is.  That's where she shows. She is not part of the New York or any other art scene. She is an "amateur".  She paints beautiful, careful, representational, post-post-impressionist paintings.  They are just extremely good.

That's the problem.  Now, I don't claim that my work, especially my most recent work, which is what I am really talking about, is on par with this painter's work.  Nonetheless, there is something in the analogy.  My new work has departed, intentionally, from the kind of post-New York School, post-modern, surrealism, that used to be my trade, and has been making attempts to use very plain, subtly tuned, language, in what often appears to be a confessional mode, i.e. based on personal experience, in a narrative style.  Not always, but there's a lot of that.  Certainly, at first glance, someone might revolt from the easy rhythms, the use of internal and end rhyme, the first person singular, and dismiss the work as the work of an amateur.  I do not, as far as I know, belong to a school.  Although, I have an MFA from a good program, it is in fiction, not poetry.  Although I read lots and lots of contemporary work in journals and anthologies, more often than not, I am appalled at the lack of musicality, the pretentiousness, and most importantly, the sophomoric thought that passes for profundity.  I can see why, in contrast with this work, I seem like an amateur.

In my own defense, I want to say just a few words.  One, I am an amateur, I suppose. And gladly.  I am outside academia, which, I think, has given me the freedom to write in a way which does not conform to current expectations or taste.  Two, given that freedom, I have decided not to hide behind my education and reading, but to try to create substantial work that is not meant to impress anyone, but to get done, what I conceive admittedly, is the work of a poem, that is, carry a "thought" that can only be expressed through the fusion of poetic art (music, diction) with imagination (metaphor, rhetoric).  So, what my poems do is meant to look straightforward: I often use form, and I try mightily to let the poem do the work, not me.  In other words, I try not to beat the reader over the head with what I call the argumentum of the poem, try not to beat the reader over the head with my erudition or my cleverness, but make something very hard look very easy.  I don't want to be part of a movement or a school. I want to write poetry.  In fact, I can't help but write poetry.  I think there's a lot more than meets the eye in my poems, but easy dismissal may be the price I pay for the path I have chosen.  If, at first glance, my work looks like the work of an amateur, I understand.

An Email to a Poet

Jeff:

Thanks for sending the poem.  I feel remiss that I never have anything to say, except gushing compliment, but perhaps if I explain the way I read other people's work, you'll understand.  My first rule is I don't try to make it something it is not.  I don't belong to a "school".  In other words, whenever I read anything, I try as best as I can not to look for what's not there or what could be there.  At the macro level, this discipline means that if someone gives me a poem or story about a dog, I don't say, you know, dogs are okay, but what if it was about a cat.  Obviously, the temptation that requires resistance is more often centered on the argumentum of the poem, not the subject, but you get the idea. [I should hastily add that I have no quarrel at all with either the subject nor the argumentum of this poem, or any of your poems, that's not what I am saying.  I am thinking more of other occasions, other writers, but even then, to be frank, I am extremely open-minded and am almost universally delightfully surprised by what other people write about and where that subject leads the poem. The poem you sent is no exception to that general experience.  This poem does what, I think, poems do best.  It takes a "simple" image drawn from regular life and fills it with beauty, music, love, and grace.]

Instead what I look at are the technical aspects of the poem.  How does this poem set out to do what it wants to do?  Is there anything out of place, a stylistic detour that jars?  Is it ham-fisted or tinny?  Does the thought leave the poem at any point to grab some easy substitute, like cliche or sententiousness, etc.?  Those kinds of things.  And Jeff, your poems never do any of those things.  You are skilled and exact.  To the point, in fact, where the skill and exactitude seem like a kind of easy going looseness (the hardest and best thing to do.)

This last rule is going to seem weird.  I don't expect poems to be "perfect".  You know, the Golden Bowl rule.  Only an idiot would want to patch the cracks where humanity, humility and grace shine through.  Think in terms of meter and rhyme.  Nothing is more horrible than perfect iambic pentameter with inflexible masculine end rhymes. I strongly believe that the same is true for every other aspect of a poem.

So, when someone shows me a poem that is skilled, yet human, that comes from love and humility, that doesn't miss a step, yet still seems like a casual stroll, that embraces its own tentativeness and incompleteness, yet leads us to a place of wonder, all I can say is : It's great.  Jeff, it's great.  I love it.

Keith

Vote Now

I used to only write poems like this one.  Now, I hardly ever write poems of this ilk: allusive, abstract, difficult, whimsical.  You know, New York School, y'all.  They were my teachers, after all. Is this regression?  I thought I'd leave it to a vote.  Let me know if you approve or disapprove.  Yea or nay. If the response if positive, I will not crawl about the room in despair.  If negative, meh.

Machines Made of Meat

                                    The origin of everything is nothing.

In some versions of reality,

You are reading this poem.

In others, you are still in bed.

One is led, therefore, into difficulties,

Except, of course, for Li Po.

That wily bastard is riding a surfboard,

Dangling on the lip of a wave,

Just as his cigarette dangles from his lip,

While he points at an empty space

In the cloudless sky as he sidles by,

Where the moon would want to be,

If it happened to be following along.

Everything is liable to decay.

If someone, traditionally called the observer,

Happened to be following along,

That person would be engaged

In a shameless act of poetry:

Did your friend, Chang, dream

That he was a butterfly, or did

The butterfly dream that it was he?

Nobody knows what’s behind door number three.

Keith Dunlap

You Don't know What You Don't Know

I feel as though writing poetry has been shanghai'd by people who can't write having their revenge against those who can, much in the same way politics has been taken over by people who can't think, having their revenge against people who can. (I don't really think that, but it makes a good polemic for what follows.) I think writing is intuitive, but it comes with a lot of practice and hopefully a good editor.  I know I have written a lot of bad stuff and continue to write a lot of bad stuff, but I've done it so much that I can tell when I've hit my standard at least, so that I am prepared to turn it over to someone else's set of critical eye, because, and this last point is essential, there will always be things I cannot see, good and bad.  The worst attribute for a writer is a kind of American Idol defensive righteousness about one's one work.  One needs a thick skin, of course, and some detachment from the success or failure show, but there is nothing sadder and more obnoxious than the neophyte convinced of his own posterity.  (I should know, having been that guy.)  Nothing is harder and more uncertain than good writing.

Simultaneous Submissions

I am now mostly submitting to magazines that do not accept simultaneous submissions.  Why? Not why am I submitting to these magazines (they are generally higher echelon magazines,) but why don't they accept simultaneous submissions?  I mean, really.  What's the big deal?  It is okay for writers to experience constant rejection, but not magazines?  In other words, are these magazine's egos so precious that if they accept a poem, and then learn that the writer had neglected to tell them that the same poem had been accepted somewhere else a month earlier, it is an affront that can't be countenanced?  I actually accidentally submitted simultaneously to a magazine that does not take simultaneous submissions and the magazine sent me a scathing letter barring me for life from submitting to it (because of an honest mistake).  Really?  I still laugh about that to myself once in a while.  Perhaps magazines do it to simply limit the number of submissions they receive.  Really?  Does it work?  It seems self-defeating: why would you want to limit the number of submissions you receive?  Having edited two magazines myself, it seems quite easy to eliminate (for whatever arbitrary editorial reason you espouse) about 95% of the submissions one receives on a quick read; sometimes just the first line tells you everything you need to know (sorry, the very human mind at work).  But, if, for whatever reason, (and I suspect the only real reason is because the big magazines can do it,) a magazine does not take simultaneous submissions, I think a necessary concurrent policy is that the turn around time should not exceed four weeks, six weeks at the most.  Otherwise, you put writers in the extremely difficult position of not getting poems published until years after a poem is written, if at all.  If "magazine a" takes six months to a year to respond to a submission, and then so do "magazine b" and "magazine c", etc., by the time "magazine g" sees the poem, the poet will have evolved, the world of poetry will have evolved, and a very good poem may have become stale, either in the eyes of the poet or the world.  Any policy other than accepting simultaneous submissions or not accepting them but promising a very rapid turnaround is only inconsiderate and insecure.  It is certainly not writer friendly.

The New Self by Steve Gehrke (reprinted without permission)

Are you or are you not of brain, matter's boss/ or its crevasse, are you the body itself,/ or more than that, immortal you, crouched/ in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat?

The entire poem is too long to replicate here, but everything I love about this poem is in this first stanza: the music, beautiful end rhyme and interior rhyme driving the poem into unexpected places; the thought, complex without being pretentious (love crouched instead of couched).  Just great.  One of many fine poems in the latest issue of Poetry.

It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there. William Carlos Williams. (tip to Peter Case)

I try to read a poem each day.  Mr. Keillor can be of assistance here.  For me, sadly, it's often more of a professional stance, like a daily rhythm vitamin. If I can't keep my hand in, I've got to keep my ear to the ground at least, so to speak.  What is the good doctor talking about above?  I think the key word is miserably.  Men die every day.  You don't have to be a doctor or a poet to know that.  Is poetry a hand into the unknown?  It certainly is that.  Ha! But, is it that in such a practical sense as a narcotic might be?  Do those who don't read poetry die more miserably than those who do?  I am avoiding the implication that poetry could have a broader effect, i.e., make the world a better place, so that some of the miserable deaths that we inflict on each other might be reduced, although I'm not sure why I should skirt this issue.  I would say that every poem is political, of course.  Making poetry in the current climate is an act of resistance, for sure.  But, does that make poets freedom fighters?  Ha again!  It is anti-materialist (and, therefore, presumably, anti-capitalist).  I think the greatest error of our age is the assumption that the only thing that motivates people is greed.  Poetry proves that fallacy. Ha again and again! Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

Yesterday, I was sitting on the beach with my friend, the devastationalist, Philip Shelley, talking about a recent discussion I had with my wife about poetry.  It is my wife's position that poetry is peculiarly subjective, and that, as a result, the range of what passes for poetry in poetry world is completely unpredictable and wide open (or, at least, for the purposes of this post, that is what I think my wife's position is).  This bothers me a little because she is my wife, and rightly or wrongly, it feels as though what she is saying is that the thing you pour your heart, intelligence, and considerable effort into is a flighty and somehow insubstantial thing because it has no standards.  I don't really think that is what she is saying. That's my most insecure interpretation of what she is saying. I counter that by saying no, I think there are objective standards of measurement that set one poem higher or lower against another.  I agree that there are editors and writers of poetry who have closed minds, who, consciously or unconsciously, have intense predilections for one "type" of poetry over another and whose work and publications are ruled by these subjective criteria, sometimes publishing worse poems because they align with what one thinks the subject matter, diction, look and feel of a poem should be, and ignore better poems because they don't conform to one's prejudices, but that doesn't mean that there aren't poems that engage in cliche or whose music is ham-fisted or whose diction is overwrought or mere jargon, etc., or that there are not poems whose thought is startling and creative, whose music accords beautifully with the thought, and whose word choices are made not for some silly conformist reason, but to bring the music and thought together in this magical way.  What do you think?