Poetry vs poetry and First thought, best thought

Ever since the little river started or since I surrendered anyhow and agreed to jump in I haven't been sleeping well. As alluded to before, that can trip me out cuz for someone such as me who has psycho-mania in her catalogue not sleeping can be a dangerous thing. But it's not, not now, and that is the cool thing--I am awake at 4, or 2, or not sleeping at all--or only for two hours or so this week when I get home from what all week were 12 hour days and I'm like whatever, I'm going with it. It's like Bobby Ray the shaman said once years ago, it's only your fear that will keep you sick...

Anyhow since for me writing is Queen and blogging has become part of my practice, part of the discipline of my smithing away at this craft--in very much the first thought best thought style or what I've taken to calling spontaneous download--I thought I better jump on here and give some time to my practice. And then there's the act of writing poetry, different as I explained to a new writer friend just yesterday or no that was two days ago by now, than Poetry capital P which to me is an ethic, a tribe, or value--a state of not just being touched by the madness but alluring and living in it all the same: the saying of the Holy Amen. But as a wordsmith, as a practitioner of art actually writing poetry is different than say the practice of just first thought best thought, and also different than memoir writing. It includes it, but becomes too a strange cohesion of like, sitting in my boat on the river but keeping too a mild hand at all times on the oar. But not using it for paddling, more as like a rutter, that with the slightest touch does indeed effect the trajectory of surface gliding, but only in as much as a pebble might effect a ripple, and the water and the boat--the whole experience of the trip ultimately is of the same...

I wrote poems yesterday so that is why I am thinking so to speak aloud. No, that was two days ago--in the morning, five good poems that remind me a lot of that November in 03 when I was in my little room off my studio apartment on Mt.Royal. The poems and momentum that started my litmag Cantalma and also was the beginning of Fishing Rock.

Ahhh, hello little river. You fucking ho! Careful what you wish for sometimes? I wouldn't change it tho, wouldn't change it at all not even in exchange for the world...

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.