Sunday, November 15, 2009

TEN POST-OCCUPATIONS 11/15/09

1) The difference between making a poem and writing one...

2) "the fishes of the sea speak Breton" and "as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words" -- Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

3) Every lining has its silver cloud./This be the old materials/(plural) swagger.

4) Smelling like campfire, I try to be as quiet as an inner tube.

5) "I have habituated myself to simple hallucination; I have clearly seen a mosque in the place of a gas-works" -- Arthur Rimbaud

6) "It seems to me, the characteristic of new art from a social viewpoint consists of dividing the public into two classes of men: those who understand it and those who do not" --Ortega y Gasset
Skirting the issue of "two classes of men" (no pun intended), perhaps "understanding" isn't/wasn't the point of a lot of new art. Maybe the two classes are actually (at least) three: those who understand it, those who think they understand it, and those (the vast majority) for whom "new art" is entirely irrelevant... Somehow, this is a massive problem for me as an artist, because most people's sense of contemporary art is "new art."

7) Everyone in the world speaks English AND their own thing. Americans speak nothing or else.

8) I lectured for hours and the perfume was deadly, the eyes in their sockets so raggedy and wrong.

9) Tonight: Mary Anne's roasted Brussel sprouts w/ pasta, olive oil, garlic and parmesan

10) from A Note on Rejection: As both a poet and editor, I've made huge mistakes over the years--sending work to the wrong places, sending the wrong work to the right places, accepting things I shouldn't have, passing up things that are brilliant... And speaking of brilliance--having talent--even (maybe especially) genius (yeah, the word's a problem, so what?)--is no guarantee that anyone else will be able to recognize it. Sadly, for lots of amazing artists, the stars never align, but we don't start or continue to be artists because of the alignment. We start and continue to be artists because of the stars.

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