A Poetics (# 88 - 92)

Geof Huth, "Phyllotaxis 001"
88. Discipline

"And most artists," says an anonymous architect in a film entitled My Architect: A Son's Journey, "don't have any discipline." And later tonight, I realized that, since I will be giving a reading of "mathematical poetry," that means the organizer is a mathematician, that her desire for order exceeds even mine, and mine always requires some significance to the number of poems in any book I create. Entire poems of mine are guided by various means of counting, of putting in place possibly invisible order.

Yet I cannot understand the need to have every biography of every poet be 129 or 130 words in length (and those with 129, I assume, are giving some dispensation). I cannot understand why my name cannot appear in space, six months before the reading, with a number of poems that doesn't coincide with numbers of poems of those other poets.

There are many kinds of discipline, and the poet's is, foremost, the discipline of the word, a discipline that sometimes requires the happy acceptance of chance, the messiness of error, mere dirtiness. Sometimes, control is the ability to allow something to fly out of your hands, to exist even if you do not guide it.

Discipline is more a trying than a making. The disciplined poet is the one who makes a poem with some regularity or the one who waits until the time for making it good. Discipline is the act of knowing when you can do what you must do.

Discipline is a seeing, the perception of pattern, and then the capture of the pattern. Poem as a pattern of words. Voice as a pattern of sounds. Sight as a pattern of letters or lines or blocks of text.

We live within patterns mathematical, and not. Chaos works only in that it surprises our expectation for pattern, but that unexpected pattern that brings light to the small world of the mind is the one that brings us joy. For pattern is almost a sign of the existence of meaning in the universe.


89. ear

Here, it is.


90. (ear)2

Gotta have one.


91. Punk

chore.


92. Hand

It is the hand who's the maker. Let the mind take the credit.

Tendons that prove we are fleshy marionettes. Move the fingers, through dancing, as the makers of meant.

Hand, and then to it. Hand that can mold.

Hand that perceives through a sense that must touch. I tap and I write and I scrawl and I be.

I crib and I crave and I crawl, and I be. I cradle with fingers the pen who is me.

I cradle with fingers the pen who is me. I write every word as if it were true.


ecr. l'inf.