“The historians leave degree of framed art behind when discussing the inequitable certainty in relation to how erasure of talking parallels the wiped clean muscle of talking.”
---Troy Suben
When visiting the 2012 summer writing program at Naropa's “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics”, I began to wonder what sort of material practice is free from ideological bias? How does one go about making one's poetry practice real in relation to the world? Viewing the 60’s counter culture from the vantage point of someone born in the early 70’s was really eye opening. Especially in light of historical/generational signifiers such as how the military industrial complex opened channels of work force as women shifted from the domestic to the public sectors---> the baby boomer generation ran counter to someone born in the 70s; Capital free market does not necessarily mean "equitable certainty"------>binary split between assimilation and anarchy.
A collective hallucination for a new season and a companionable nostalgia for the New York School made it feel important to meet one’s literary heroes if only to understand something of the personal circumstances which informed their work. With assimilation one strives for integration with mainstream even if it means accommodation of hierarchical values---> the chain of associations as found in the Net of Indra & Diamond Sutra where each link of equal importance---> Words were a point of entry to indicate directionality. Is there such a thing as an irony-free zone? relational vs. non relational. It is possible to have a relationship with every living thing. At some point there is nothing to express. Thoughts/Emotions/postures/gestures/ all have something to do with how we use words and what we are able to articulate by going through the correct channels as in Committees/communities of practice. I feel a particular kinship with the interesting coveys of the New York School, their speech acts and interrogatives into the nature of existence----> Some early glimmers of poetry, a few islands of camaraderie appear here and there in an otherwise sea of grey. My poetics seemed best articulated as a juncture of collapsed routes, closed off from moments of gravity, but it also really depended on the mind of the person, just as much as speaking about how a person in love is drawn towards exciting situations.
Can we map ourselves in the gaze, split and divided versus merging oceanic? Can the poem be restructured or surpassed by “reactivating” its meaning as though it were a structure buried in the past?-->Oedipus Rex's exile was a way of finding out that “I don’t love you as much” or vise-versa---Way finding --> The state of being lost--->Perennial Advice: Publish sparingly or quit altogether for twenty years or so to study how the mind works or spend time explaining the difference between the New Yorker and a scratchy sweater. When I was rejected I thought perhaps my poems got lost or didn’t get through though “Not all who wander are lost” counseled Gandalf from the depths of garments. ---->vertigo--> terra inviolata: radical alterations in the relationship between land and sea---> dictating recesses where tireless minds display their most secretive and affordable memories.