On Poems, & the Writing Nuts

My new pal Mike, this writer-buddy from here in Easton and self-proclaimed lover of running (Mike I had to edit that bc instead of writing running I originally wrote "funning"!), long-boarding and his kids and fam, who also is re-discovering his voice and source-creativity-power in motion of song and poetry and light, just wrote this post about the first poet that ever turned him on.

Sandburg. It's a great post read it. The poem he posted is a dream all charge charge gogogo.

Who was yours?

For me it was Emerson, tho, & as I should of paid attention to all the way back then, it was his prose/ethics that first stood out:

from Nature
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches....

I remember, sure as anything, the moment, dropping on to my desk my own handwrote wilted journal of softback poems with a soft thwush of its pages as it landed because my teacher, who had a funny long name I no longer remember, mentioned the Transcendental Eye. Holy hell I thought in wonder and looked at her dazed, mystical, like she'd just woken me from a dream and here I am surprised as I was to find that I was in reality. I never did my homework it was my junior year so her lesson was all new to me, my first AP class and mostly I was consumed with having gotten arrested over the weekend bc one of the upperclassmen girls in the class had ratted on me at the party after I left blowin up my spot. Yea it was me that left the seen of that hit and run. (It was a parked, empty car that I took the bumper off of, not some poor shmoe left to wail in the street...)

Here, here! this teacher telling about the Universalism's and Transcendentalism and for the first time, here, here is some work that gets my attention, here are some writers I can get my hands on and I want you to know I read him, and Thoreau that whole afternoon in the back of the locker room and later, instead of religion class with Ms. Bo.

Next of course it was Ginsberg and the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...which would come to me and come to me later as I taught in the jail and needed to show these young street savy black men how fierce, how true, how real Poetry could get it on. I still remember the ache and sizzle reading it aloud in that cold, dark and stale windowless room. The eyes and nods and caught breath, the looks on all their faces....

It was Snyder that helped me cross the threshold, tho. Now we're in college, I am clean, my brain for the first time harnessing and focusing and making real connections through and through. The Bath. I wrote a 10-page paper on it in three hours flat and it was the only A+ I ever got with not one mark or yea, but...feedback. It blew my mind, and my prof's, too. Read it. Read it out loud like Mooney taught me to do. Pay good attention to the comas, the indents, the natural pauses until the rhythm gets in to you, melds with you, the poem and you are it and become you, and bigger than you, too.

In other writerly news, I want you also to stop by Erika's post today for a little bit of communion. God, this girl. I totally feel her, remember nodding out behind the cash register at Play It Again Sam's my senior year of college because I was working on my first and only fiction novel and was up all night long three, four nights, whole weeks in a row. Coffee infusions and lots of cigarettes. Sitting up out of dead drenched sleep with lines charging through me head. I cant wait to see where she ends up....

Happy weekend, friends. It's sunny out here on the ol EC, again! O sunshine my true and hope-full friend.

i will call him poppa for he is my religion

"Sitting is the act of looking in. Meditation is fundamental, you can't subtract anything from that. It's so fundamental that it's been with us for forty or fifty thousand years in one form or another. It's as fundamental a human activity as taking naps is to wolves, or soaring in circles is to hawks and eagles.

Now the completion of this is understood very clearly in the Tibetan tradition when they speak of the three mysteries: body, speech, and mind. The three things that are closest to us--our bodies, our minds, and our language--are the three things we know least about, that we pay least attention to, that we use as our tools throughout our lifetimes to various relatively limited end, including survival, but there's very little attention to the fact of existence of this in its own right. A simple message of the teaching is that much of the pain, suffering, confusion, and contradiction you encounter in your own life is simply caused by not paying attention to what you have closest to you from he beginning and then using it well: body, speech, and mind.

For myself I personally all I would add to that are some very ancient and to me beautiful and useful ways of handling things: attention to place; gratitude to the physical universe and to all the other beings for what they exchange with you; good health, good luck, good crops. Basic old-style religion.

And, proper attention to your dreams, fairy tales, and myths, as a kind of ancient universal, human psychological lore that you can and do contact."