Kim Addonizio: 04.24.06-04.28.06

I woke up this morning thinking about Bach. About the fact that he had all these commissions and composed sublime music, often music-to-order. Maybe he didn’t always feel inner necessity. He was brilliant anyway.

I checked out the article yesterday’s commenter recommended (online at rocksaltplum.com). Think I'll leave alone The State of Contemporary Poetry, except for any previous comments.

Or, maybe not. Qualification: I suppose I meant really, in my previous post, that poetry has been hijacked sometimes by the intellectualizers. And just as much by sappy emotionalists (probably not a word—what word do I want?) Though I have always sort of wanted to write an Emotionalist Manifesto. “Since feeling is first,” etc.—But then I immediately know that’s not it. It’s like the New Age—I hate the New Age. I hate its language. But really, I believe in balance, harmony, wholeness, flow (why do those words sound so insipid lined up together?). So, I hate the “This happened to me and it’s my expression so it’s all brave and beautiful” line, and I do not want to practice therapy without a license, and have found myself in that discomfiting position several times. . . .

Where I'm writing from

Thanks to the people who commented. I was sitting here feeling like I didn’t really want to think, or talk, about poetry today. Poetry, that is, as words on a page. Then I thought, well, if we think poetry is words on the page, we’re missing the essence. I mean, we call poetry Poetry because it is a way to get close to it. The “it” being something else.

Here’s something that surfaced in my reading today:
“Power presents only the falsified, official sense of words; in a manner of speaking it forces them to carry a pass, determines their place in the production process (where some of them conspicuously work overtime) and gives them their paycheck . . . Poetry is becoming more and more clearly the empty space, the antimatter, of consumer society, since it is not consumable (in terms of the modern criteria for a consumable object: an object that is of equivalent value for each of a mass of isolated passive consumers).”—Guy Debord

I don’t know about that equivalent value thing. Or that consumers are isolated. I think there’s quite a community of consumption, even if it’s a perversion of what we mean by community. And then there’s the community for poetry consumption, and the poetry economy, and the power structures in the world of poetry. Which are not poetry, but which partly govern how it makes its way in the world.

I’m doing this on Sunday for my first post Monday morning. I was saying yesterday on my own site that I was resisting writing, that it felt like work, while playing my harmonica was, well, play. Then I was driving back from running (usually I do gym stuff because I get shin splints from running, but today I just wanted to run & be outside, & it was lovely & gray & there were eucalyptus everywhere, & weeds & flowers coming up through the mudslides, & dogs & women walking together & a man riding bikes with his kid, handing the kid a bottle of water as they rode & just that one gesture made me somehow wildly happy, seeing a father and son out together like that)—but anyway,