On December 31st,2021, NBC New reported that fish fell from the sky over Texarkana, Texas.
There is a well-documented case of meat rain in Bath County, Kentucky. I point this out only to say that the world did not end, vulture vomit was blamed, and the world moved on. This happened in 1876 a bit before what is in some circles called the Fin de Siecle… generally understood as the 20 years prior and twenty years after the turn of the (20th) Century. The end and the beginning is generally understood to be the window for some weird shit. Spiritualism, End of Days Mania, plagues, pandemics, wars. It’s all the same shit that happens every other time but somehow being stuck in time at the end and the beginning makes it mean something.
Our dystopias all need context. Context gives it a pattern and our brains love patterns. Our brains focus on patterns because patterns are what helped us evolve. As a matter of fact, most of the evolutionary process, after a significant change… like our earliest biological ancestors leaving the trees, for example… is mostly a game of WHICH ONE OF THESE IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER. Judge danger by it looking or feeling like what was dangerous before. Judge safe food by it smelling or looking or tasting like safe food before.
Which is to say that whether the meat rain was vulture vomit, a divine message, or some detritus from an accident that fell through an unzipped time/space pocket and onto Mrs. Couch’s head it’s just one more piece that looks like something we’ve seen before.
There are as many poetic craft and composition regimens as there are poets. Some have more ritualized processes than others. Some can only write in the morning. Some can only write late into the night. Some carve their time after supper and when the kids are in bed. Some write prolificly. Some are slow and steady crafters. Some write every day. Some only write when they feel properly inspired.
There are no writing practices that are more correct than others. They all work or don’t depending on the particular poet and their particular life.
Nearly all of my poems and 95% of my prose, including this bit, are written in the moment. I revise very little.
Lately I write in brief down times during my work day… raising steam or working the throttle on the Belle of Louisville tends to have a similar effect on my writing.
Sometimes I start out with the intention to focus on a particular style… a sonnet or a tanka or a ghazal or a haiku. Mostly I let the poem lead. Sometimes the poem allows me to lead. The relationship is an organic one.
There are times when the poems drive themselves daily and more often. Sometimes there’s a bit of gunk in the line, and the poems drive slower, or not at all, and not necessarily to my satisfaction. In that case, I revisit themes, the landscapes ajmnd geography of things I’ve written, or I read a new poet or I find an poet I’ve read before and I read them again. Sometimes I read something other than poetry.
So if there is an apparent haste in my poetry or it slows down in number or in quality, I generally don’t dwell. I just vent the burners and fire again.
Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.
Jean Cocteau, Diary of an Unknown (1988)
I’ve been active and enagaged in my development as poet since I was 10 years old. From conversations I’ve had with other poets, I know that was probably entirely too young to know who and what you are in the world. But that’s what it was. I just knew. I was a word junkie from the first time I put pencil to paper and wrote something that meant something to me… a poem about a sunset. Looking back, what a wonderful gift. To know. Also looking back: what a terrible knowledge to have. Most poets wander into it later. They discover a knack and become addicts. They wander into the literary trap house and there I am, already flopped out on a mattress, poems and prosey bits strung around amongst the rats and field mice, far gone and now just a cautionary tale they mostly choose to ignore.
The problem then is figuring out the way. When you’re 10 and have no in-person guidelines to work from, you go searching. Before the great gogging Google Machine, all the search spiders were intuitive. And no matter what anyone tells you, sometimes intuition is just plain wrong. So it took me a while. I missed out on some life, maybe, waiting for life to happen. But I like to think I’ve made up for that, too. Once I found Walt Whitman and then the Beats, I found a pathless land. I stopped waiting and I went. College was a pretext to find some way through the world. More than once I fell into the trap of thinking about writing as a way to make a living. I wandered into space filler jobs, avoiding career and the potting and rooting effect that can have. I eventually stumbled into teaching almost accidentally, trying to find a safe shelter to write from and found probably the only other vocation I will ever have, which I was, at length, exiled from. But the words were still there.
Now, I know there are “professional” poets… which is to say, they get paid to go be poets. They lead workshops. They write reviews. They teach in creative writing programs. They publish in Poetry. They have a well-earned niche. That’s never been my experience, but one of the things I picked up along the way… or maybe it was something I had to begin with… was a deep impatience for the Great and Wonderous Oz of the poetry culture engine. I read recently on Substack an article referencing something the author(s) called an ecomonic culture engine. And with all due respect to the author(s), it did bring to mind the man behind the green curtain.
But I do understand the mechanical universe as a metaphor. It’s one I fall into a lot because it is the aptest description not only of the universes that people build but of the way we are bound, by our blood and bone roots, to describe: the universes we collectively experience that we haven’t built. After so long, you start to see the giant pistons spinning the earth pushing somewhere above the clouds.
I suppose, based on my position – or lack thereof – in mainline poet culture, I could think of myself as an “outsider.” I used to. I think “outsider art” might still be a term used to describe art that happens outside of mainstream machinery. But anyone I ever met who used it was careful to delineate between “outsider” art and “folk” art, which — which, as far as I can tell, has more to do with what the skyline outside your window looks like.
The standard equations: Mountains + “unschooled creativity = folk art. Brick, steel, and cement + “unschooled” creativity = “outsider” art. If you include the variable of schooling the equation looks more like the ideal gas equation.
One more fucking niche. No thanks. Leave the marketing to the suits in marketing. Just make sure to pay them their percentage. Which is, if anyone is being honest, what the poet culture engine is about: marketing.
That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of good work that comes out of the poet culture engine. There is. But like all engines, the poet culture is a closed system. Sometimes it needs new gas or fresh oil. But the basic operation of the engine doesn’t change.
I think if I had found any recognition when I was younger and believed it was inevitable it would have been the death of my work. At least, that’s what I tell myself now, at 50 years old, 40 of them writing and focusing on being a writer. But I like where I am. I’m not headlining readings and workshops. I’m not quoted in articles. But I am still writing.
