Spit this out in the workvan yesterday morning. Like most of them nowadays.
vision of reason
I want to occupy your mind,
Make you crawl to me on the ground.
Let's not be stupid and waste time,
It'll always be the other way around.
I'm lost in my thoughts of beautiful music,
where everything has that big carnival sound,
swept up in the dust of friendly faces
and like-minded enemies.
It's been only 17 years,
can we do 16 more?
For a head so full of ferocious intent,
growing bigger and unbalanced.
I don't want your folksy approximations,
names and numbers, please,
to ease my worried mind.
Driving alone again,
again and again, these suburban streets,
have been my only home,
nauseate my haunted dreams,
shaped me into this mediocrity,
where toil goes no further than acceptance.
I love how you live right down the street,
yet you act like we've never met;
duly noted, I'll get lost alone in the snow.
My heavy head looms to the precipice,
like some deranged Kilroy, staggering
to the threshold,
clouding every
vision of reason.
Love the snow,
the way it suffocates
this scent of delusion and hope,
and binds the telling of the tale,
paying the highest cost of being safe and free.
I can't take the sun anymore,
flagged down by boundless stupidity.
Don't give me your vague generalities;
give me the incision nearing my heart.
It's been only 17 years,
give me another 16,
to sweat you out of my system.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
falling off the shoulders of giants
It's sad what has happened to poetry in the last 50 years or so. Where before, it was a select few who outshined all others, now the artform has lapsed into the hands of the masses. This is not to say elitism should be the rule, but the anti-elitism mentality that has swept the genre has, in turn, cut itself loose from the foundation upon which it was built. This not in favor of stagnation; one must always progress, but lacking a proper base, collapse is inevitable. It was in the Reader, I believe, that I read an article on this very subject. The author of said piece, however, was praising the transformation poetry has undertaken where now anyone and everyone is a poet. But are they really? I love music, but I lack any formidable musical talent, so I don't pretend to be a musician. It's more difficult, with a written genre, as we all use language, and thus, anyone can poeticize, right? The market is saturated. There is no point in the idea of being a poet anymore. It's become a pasttime rather than an artform, just some odd antiquated activity with which people occasionally consort.
But what's the point of poetry in the first place. I've always seen it as contradictory: utilizing language to transcend language into a much more profound yet sublime substantiation. It has to move beyond the trappings of the mind and break through into consciousness, and more importantly, to communicate between subject and object in a way inexpressable to the simple mind and concurrent words. Who else in history could have a better, more exhaustingly exacting view, however, than Ezra Pound?
'Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.'
"True witness" is what gets me here. It conjures up that sense of progress to the profoundly experiential out of the mere referential. This is what all true art aspires to, toils for, is suffered over.
'Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.'
It is not simply a matter of writing in verse, it is a discipline. But I understand that things change. I'm trying not to lament a forgotten era or anything of the sort. It's unfortunate that poetry had to dwindle in stature and relevance so much. It's no longer about the passion and transcendence, now it's about "expression" and acceptance. The aim is altered now. No one strives for such a glorious vision anymore.
It took Pound more than 70 years to finally achieve this, after thousands of poems, countless translations, and the inimicable Cantos, standing monolithic in the vast field of modern art and thought. If you (whoever's still actually reading) ever read the Cantos, it will take time, more than most could ever have patience for, you will see the exemplification of this movement from a barren, anachronistic mentality into the precision of a mind unbound by time, into a pleroma of consciousness. One must sift through a dozen languages, 10,000 years of history and myth, and countless names and places that have lived and existed, some only in idea. But after pushing through the density, one arrives possibly the most beautiful verses ever written, none so unabashed and raw, the essence of language he sought for all these decades.
—‘The hells move in cycles, / No man can see his own end’
-‘A blown husk that is finished / but the light sings eternal / a pale flare over marshes’
‘And as to who will copy this palimpsest? / al poco giorno / ed al gran cerchio d’ombra [in the small hours, with the darkness describing a huge circle] / But to affirm the gold thread in the pattern / . . . / To confess wrong without losing rightness: / Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it flow thru. / A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour’
(palimpsest = A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.)
It's doubtful anyone will truly grasp the magnitude of his work, or that he even did. Clearly he thought himself a failure at the end, a miserable old incapable bastard. Let's face it, the man himself was not an easy one. Genius like that, more often than not, creates fractures in the personality, making it difficult to differentiate between said genius and other, more ignoble thoughts. He's often cited as a notorious anti-Semite, but it's just not that simple. It's not that he hated Jews themselves, moreso the Judeo-Christian outlook that had seized Western civilization for almost two millennia. He saw the advent these religions as the downfall of the traditional, heroic and mystical way, as the world delved deeper into materialism and money. He wrote a lot on economics, namely how credit is a dangerous thing on such a large scale. But credit couldn't wreck an economy could it?
Pound stated that "maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the cause of economic depressions. Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars." (Encyclopedia Britannica)
While his demeanor certainly lent him to be a rather bizarre and sometimes incoherent man, it doesn't get much more prophetic than this. There is only thing that modern civilization operates on: money, moreso the control of the distribution of wealth. It seems to be the primary focus of Americans especially. Your entire childhood is controlled by other people setting you up to be controlled by the dollar. 20 years of school, of pointless "extra-curricular" bullshit, of meaningless structure just to make sure you fit into the scheme of the money-making machine.
And it's all those who find this system insane that are cast out into ignorance, deemed as lone nuts, madmen, fascists, commies, etc. It's so very easy to demarcate someone outside the system in simple terms, simply because they're incompatible. Of course, some people simply are fucking crazy, but how could you know unless you tried to understand? That's one thing this world really needs more of: empathy. Not sympathy, not guilt for situations beyond your control, but basic understanding of others. Everyone's perspective is different, and a universal worldview will never cohere. We lack so much real communication between us.
I've learned, however (the hard way), that if you want others to act a certain way, to think, be a certain way, you will never EVER be satisfied. You can't control your environment, only your perception thereof. And some people will grow more selfish, some become more distant, and some just keep getting lovelier, while some forget you unfortunately, and some you fortunately forget about, your worst enemy might become your best friend again, vice versa, and love is only what you can piece together out of the chaotic hearts and minds of others and what you can connect with, to the ends of your short lives that nothing could ever last longer than in your eyes, or for only a few moments, when all other time, past, present, and future, is spurious at best.
But what's the point of poetry in the first place. I've always seen it as contradictory: utilizing language to transcend language into a much more profound yet sublime substantiation. It has to move beyond the trappings of the mind and break through into consciousness, and more importantly, to communicate between subject and object in a way inexpressable to the simple mind and concurrent words. Who else in history could have a better, more exhaustingly exacting view, however, than Ezra Pound?
'Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.'
"True witness" is what gets me here. It conjures up that sense of progress to the profoundly experiential out of the mere referential. This is what all true art aspires to, toils for, is suffered over.
'Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.'
It is not simply a matter of writing in verse, it is a discipline. But I understand that things change. I'm trying not to lament a forgotten era or anything of the sort. It's unfortunate that poetry had to dwindle in stature and relevance so much. It's no longer about the passion and transcendence, now it's about "expression" and acceptance. The aim is altered now. No one strives for such a glorious vision anymore.
It took Pound more than 70 years to finally achieve this, after thousands of poems, countless translations, and the inimicable Cantos, standing monolithic in the vast field of modern art and thought. If you (whoever's still actually reading) ever read the Cantos, it will take time, more than most could ever have patience for, you will see the exemplification of this movement from a barren, anachronistic mentality into the precision of a mind unbound by time, into a pleroma of consciousness. One must sift through a dozen languages, 10,000 years of history and myth, and countless names and places that have lived and existed, some only in idea. But after pushing through the density, one arrives possibly the most beautiful verses ever written, none so unabashed and raw, the essence of language he sought for all these decades.
—‘The hells move in cycles, / No man can see his own end’
-‘A blown husk that is finished / but the light sings eternal / a pale flare over marshes’
‘And as to who will copy this palimpsest? / al poco giorno / ed al gran cerchio d’ombra [in the small hours, with the darkness describing a huge circle] / But to affirm the gold thread in the pattern / . . . / To confess wrong without losing rightness: / Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it flow thru. / A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour’
(palimpsest = A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.)
It's doubtful anyone will truly grasp the magnitude of his work, or that he even did. Clearly he thought himself a failure at the end, a miserable old incapable bastard. Let's face it, the man himself was not an easy one. Genius like that, more often than not, creates fractures in the personality, making it difficult to differentiate between said genius and other, more ignoble thoughts. He's often cited as a notorious anti-Semite, but it's just not that simple. It's not that he hated Jews themselves, moreso the Judeo-Christian outlook that had seized Western civilization for almost two millennia. He saw the advent these religions as the downfall of the traditional, heroic and mystical way, as the world delved deeper into materialism and money. He wrote a lot on economics, namely how credit is a dangerous thing on such a large scale. But credit couldn't wreck an economy could it?
Pound stated that "maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the cause of economic depressions. Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars." (Encyclopedia Britannica)
While his demeanor certainly lent him to be a rather bizarre and sometimes incoherent man, it doesn't get much more prophetic than this. There is only thing that modern civilization operates on: money, moreso the control of the distribution of wealth. It seems to be the primary focus of Americans especially. Your entire childhood is controlled by other people setting you up to be controlled by the dollar. 20 years of school, of pointless "extra-curricular" bullshit, of meaningless structure just to make sure you fit into the scheme of the money-making machine.
And it's all those who find this system insane that are cast out into ignorance, deemed as lone nuts, madmen, fascists, commies, etc. It's so very easy to demarcate someone outside the system in simple terms, simply because they're incompatible. Of course, some people simply are fucking crazy, but how could you know unless you tried to understand? That's one thing this world really needs more of: empathy. Not sympathy, not guilt for situations beyond your control, but basic understanding of others. Everyone's perspective is different, and a universal worldview will never cohere. We lack so much real communication between us.
I've learned, however (the hard way), that if you want others to act a certain way, to think, be a certain way, you will never EVER be satisfied. You can't control your environment, only your perception thereof. And some people will grow more selfish, some become more distant, and some just keep getting lovelier, while some forget you unfortunately, and some you fortunately forget about, your worst enemy might become your best friend again, vice versa, and love is only what you can piece together out of the chaotic hearts and minds of others and what you can connect with, to the ends of your short lives that nothing could ever last longer than in your eyes, or for only a few moments, when all other time, past, present, and future, is spurious at best.
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