I was styling a file in html.
At the bottom of the page I have links to Previous Page
and Next Page. I thought how curious it was to organize a book
this way, or to call what I was writing a book, still less a novel.
But what is it? A congeries of sheets? I am a sheet writer. Shee-it!
List-driven fiction. The list is a backformation from the book.
Festschrift. Poems in honor of Jack Saunders.
Who told me to be a poet?
What do you want to do—paint pictures?
No, write poems. Then do it.
Who’s to stop you?
I am reading The Twisted Thread.
The rich aren’t just rich they feel entitled.
When I went from
I found out I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I was a fish unaware of the river he was swimming in.
This is dangerous to the fish.
The river doesn’t give a shit.
It just flows on. I’ve known rivers.
Has my soul grown deep or was I just embittered?
That’s the question, isn’t it? Is you is
or is you ain’t an existentialist.
I did what I did. With what I had.
It wasn’t enough. But it was right much.
The work took the form it did because of
external circumstances. My conditions of production.
Not to put a Marxist interpretation on it.
I was subject to market forces.
Everything must come to market.
I came to market with the wrong product.
I was the 10% that didn’t get the word.
Or got the word and wouldn’t heed it.
I was a hardhead. A recalcitrant. A prisoner in
the stockade. Big P on my back. The Army has a lot
to teach us about management. That’s why retired military
are teachers in community colleges. They have night school degrees
from
A liberal arts education is something you get for yourself,
by reading. Nights and weekends. You put your job in context.
In fact, you put your education in context. Who is teaching whom
to do what? What for? What’s the purpose of it? To be a better poet?
To be a poet at all, that’s good enough. Even to be a bad one
is better than not to be one at all. It’s good enough for who it’s for.
To receive does not entail an obligation to give, reciprocally.
That’s a primitive notion. It’s naiveté. Wouldn’t it be nice
to think so. Anthropology was a romance.
I don’t believe it anymore.
Larry and I talked about it.
All you can do is laugh.
We who are about to die
fall out laughing.
Life. What a conceit.
You’re born, you learn something to do,
you work, you die, Ornette Coleman said.
And he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Free jazz will make you a philosopher.
So will living the life of a poet.