A Poetics (# 93) (Revised and Monstrously Enlarged)

Anne Gorrick's Photograph of the First Book She Ever Stole (and from a Library): Sylvia Plath's Ariel

93.Converse
AnneGorrick sent me an interesting little illustrated essay of hers about herrelationship to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She asked me to review it and sendher comments, so I made my usual copy-editing points, complete with too muchexplanation. But I was taken by the essay, by how poetic it was and how it didnot move linearly, how richer it was for being about her as well as Plath andfor being presented with some poetic honor to the word. All of this caused meto begin to respond to the essay in detail. Later, I selected additional scrapsof text from Anne's essay and from her emails to me. Sometimes, I revised thesetexts slightly before responding to them in detail. This, then, is a non-linearpoetics, one built on response and argument with Anne's words, but one indeference to that text that I slashed into tiny pieces so that she would stillbe able to publish her essay as the shimmering whole that it is.

a. [.   ]
I'm sorry about the double spacing afterperiods.  It's in my hands and I can't get it out now.
Poetryis language in all of its formulations, even the typographic, so I am sensitiveto typographic misfortunes: a typeface that presents more than it means, twoletters awkwardly kerned, two spaces trailing a period (like a tooth gap).Poetry pivots, swings, rocks on the smallest of linguistic events: therepetition of certain sounds, the look of words and lines of words on a page,the breath it takes to say a line, a certain conjoining or splitting of meaningin a single word. As a poet, to be a poet, I care about such things more thanmost people can even perceive the possible caring of. (The awkward phrasing ofmine, a leftover from the Russians.)
WhenI decide to change something, the change is immediate. 
Oneday, Joe Singer, a printer who killed himself one day in the early 1990swithout any explanation ever reaching me, convinced me that double spacingafter periods was outmoded. He released a short essay, in his journal The Printer's Devil, that noted thatdouble spacing was used when typing on typewriters with monospace fonts becauseevery letter (from the slimmest i to the widest W) was exactly the same width,allowing little visual dynamics across the line. Every line was, in essencepart of a grid, each letter filling one pre-ordained but imaginary cell on an xand a y axis. But in our modern world, where proportional fonts are those weuse almost exclusively, there is no need for the extra space. Additionally,those extra spaces cause holes in the text, holes made even more dramatic whenthe text was full justified. I abandoned that extra space that day.
Justas I changed my handwriting.
Oneday in the first half of 1977, during the year I attended the American Schoolof Tangier, I was walking in downtown Tangier and thinking about ElizaEastman's handwriting. I admired her hand, how clear and definite it was, butalso how she had simplified her letterforms when she wrote them out inlonghand.  That day, I decided toemulate her handwriting to a degree, eliminating certain extra swoops in thecursive construction of my letters. Primarily, I eliminated the first swoop offthe line, the one that began the letter. This change was most pronounced withthe f, which would from then on start at up far above the line, plunge down tothe farthest point under the line, swoop back in a loop to the middle of that vertical,and continue off to the right towards the next letter. By the time I had walkedback to my dormitory, without even having written another letter on a page, Ihad changed my handwriting.
Andthat is how my handwriting remains, though I often write letterforms in variousways while wrawing my doodled visual poems onto a page. Because differences inletterforms are differences in meaning. Because even a single lost rising of aletter off a line on a page is a meaningful absence.

b. book-stealing
Thefirst book I ever stole. (The wound in the book.)
The book is stolen by the taking of it.The book is stolen by the reading of it. No idea is self-contained, or containedwithin the mind of its author, or contained within a certain set of words.
Poems, as contraptions of language, arevehicles made to move a thought from one mind to another. As modes oftranslinguation, they are meant to transport the mind without moving itphysically. Forwardness of movement may be achieved through physical stasis,while the mind still moves within the carapace of the skull.
The word is contained nowhere but inthe mind, and the book cannot be stolen. Burn the book, and you can stillremember, still recite, words from it. The firemen can come to your house andburn it down, books and all, poems and all, for a house is just a book ofmemories, a poem of childhood.
Hayden Carruth once told us that hecould translate poems from languages he did not know because every poem wasencoded: poem = code. The trick to translation was not to understand theoriginal language but to understand the code. And a decoded message is neverthe coded message itself. It is a mirror to the language, and a mirror may besplintered and still reflect.
There is a wound in the book from beingstolen, a wound in the book from being broken, a wound from being read. Thereis a would in the book, and the reader made it, and from this would is builtthe finest of houses.
And even those houses can burn to theground.

c.cashmere
Facinganother wall of books. The old black coat was cashmere, way too big but warm.Probably there was something to flee. Something.
Black is ink is the bones of the book.The bones of the book give it its structure, allow it to hold itself together,as a piece, like the ribbing of a chest, and breathing, also, comes easier withthis structure in place.  But blackis warm from its size, like breathing, great, and enwrapping. Around the body,around the thinking body of the person who imagined the coat that is black andold, like cashmere, or a boat, there is a thought in little ink words, littlewords with horns so that they might go running across the page and crashingagainst each other in battle.
That is the form that thinking takes inthe dark, which is inky, and the inkhorned beasts beat each other back andforth in the evening, yet it never straightens out, and everything is askew,crooked, but not dishonest, merely curved, so that what light there is, and itis a small light, might ride over it swiftly and jump from the end of the horninto darkness, to become darkness, to become a part of the word horde. There isno running from the word at night, because the world then is nothing butnightwords, of ink born and bred.
With a little jam, we could stick themsomeplace from which they would not escape, until the jolt of an even biggerthought jolted them loose.

d. hair
I hadcut off most of my hair.
I cut my hair each week, there notbeing much to cut, and I am left with a smooth scalp, slightly rounded at thetop, not too unattractive, something, to me, like a domed strip of parchmentthat words might be written upon, but instead the words come up out of it, ahead half-encircled by the tonsure of this mise-en-têtê, but I see eachfollicle producing a hair as a pen or the pinprick of ink, that beginning ofword, and each week as those few hairs grow on the north slope of myself, Ifeel the words forming, the curvature of the scalp, that convex mirror thatfits up into the concavity of the sky itself over the deep blue earth, overwhich sky the universe itself in chartless space, in the three dimensions ofdarkness, is itself another convex mirror fit into the cavity of nothingness.

e.falsely
Shethought of the pack of Tarot cards that seemed important (as it turned out,falsely).
It is a root, I think, and in that waythe cards mean, by teaching how a search for meaning itself is not necessarilymeaning, by teaching that not all answers are true, and neither are allquestions. There were a pack of them, which ran all night howling not at themoon but at the image of the moon on a certain card, or they accumulated likedarkness on a deck looking out over black water, black air, solid black mud.And every message they scrawled with that ink, with their paws, disappearedinto air, earth, water the same color as it. To see what is important requiresthe identification of that which is not, for they are knit as one, woven in warpand woof, and that is their twisted cry.

f.graffiti
thebrutal fleshcut graffiti marking the days
The body is not palette; it is canvas.We write intentionally upon it of things "both wonderful & strange." A bodyis a place for making and marking. Upon it are recorded the ravages of life:the whittled finger, the smashed thumb, the pierced ear, the splinter like astick into the fleshy bottom of the foot, the slices across the arm, thecutting and sawing through the chest, the thinnest of cicatrices just underthat girlish eyebrow, more a velleity than a wish of a mark.
These are our poems, the poetry of thebody, some made by ourselves, some made by the world, unbidden, upon us, somedecorative, some reminders, all cautionary tales. We learn by failing (the sliptknife) more than succeeding (the clean pierce).

g.breathe
barelydaring to breathe, I had to buy tissues
It seems a strange coincidence that Iran out of tissues today, my nasal passages so much clearer than they usuallyare because they have been blown clean, and it is as if I can smell the world,but I seem only able to smell the insides of my nostrils with every intake ofbreath.
Coincidences are meaningless, justsimilar actions that occur at similar times, but it is that connection betweenthe two actions that makes them memorable, or notable, to us, so we give themmeaning, which is the purpose of art. We give meaning to the world. We find themeaning that is hidden before us all. We provide that meaning to people, butoften it is obscured. We hide the meaning under shapes of colors, we submergethe meaning into film, we encode the meaning into poems.
We don't simply want to show themeaning, because nothing meaningful is best appreciated after an explanation.The mind must find the pattern. The poet merely allows the pattern to be found,and found not too easily enough.

h.alarums
Helooked alarmed for a moment because he didn't recognize me.
We take excursions into theunrecognitions of life. It is a battle we fight against but must also fightfor. If everything is too clear, if we understand it too well, we have no basisfrom which to make a poem about it. A poem isn't an understanding (notclarity); it is a misunderstanding (obstruction or eclipse). A poem is notsomething shown; it is something hidden so that someone else can find it.Otherwise, why do I enjoy reading those poems that are unfathomable to me?
Maybe because they are music, as yourpoems are. Or maybe because they are codes, and it is the process of breakingthat code, that of decryption (almost descryption), that is enjoyable. Puzzlesof words designed to create puzzles of thought.
It was good that he didn't recognizeyou anymore. That gave him the opportunity to learn who you were.
If he'd known that all the time, theexperience would not have been worth it to him.  You were the poem in that event. He, the unwitting reader.

i. thwarth
athwarted Plath scholar, dashed at every turn
Art requires conflict, somethingagainst something else, maybe only resting against it, leaning, maybe.  Ian Hamilton Finlay made this point,defining the pwoermd (a poem of only a single word) impossible as an artbecause there could be no tension with it against something else. He didn'tseem to realize that a pwoermd could have internal tension to give it meaning,or tension against the expected forms of the language itself, even tensionagainst the page.
Finlay was, still, a great proponent ofthe one-word poem, but only for those that had titles, thus the text of the poem(a single word) could be in tensional opposition to the title (of any number ofwords). His last issue of his magazine Poor.Old. Tired. Horse.  (number 25,undated) included such one-word poems by a number of poets. One of these wasAram Saroyan, a poet famed for his pwoermds. One of his entries in that issuewas
lovely
lovely
Because Finlay saw the need for titles,the title of Aram's pwoermd was always a repetition of the pwoermd itself.Maybe Finlay perceived some opposition of identicals in that. Or maybe heignored his own belief in this one instance.
So as we are thwarted by something,thus we have the opportunity to create against that conflict. I see yourprofessor here as one who may have actually produced great scholarship, becauseof this conflict, even if the conflict also kept her from publishing any of it.
Thus: a thwarth of action across theface of the conflict.

j.smith
We madea class trip to Smith College to look at the drafts of the poems we had pickedin the Plath papers and see how they had been constructed.
Archives, it occurred to me today, area purified form of knowledge-making, because they are chosen for quiteintentionally saving bodies of information, and this saving is not carried outby those who had originally created them. So Plath might scribble words onpaper, and Smith College might accession them into their holdings, but Plathcould not know if Smith ever would. Archives take in only what they want, onlywhat they believe in, and what they believe in is records that can be used tocreate new knowledge.
Within the records themselves (draftsof poems, let's say, or notebooks, or diaries) there is some knowledge, that ofPlath herself, and the archives, the Smith Archives specifically, needed tobelieve in the value of that knowledge. But the value of that knowledge is inhow it can be used by others to create other knowledge, to understand her life,to understand her art (and are the two separate? or even separable?), tounderstand her times, the world of poetry, maybe even to know the officialverse culture of her era.
We make knowledge out of otherknowledge in the same way that we build poems out of other poems, just as artcomes out of other art, as life comes out of other life.
A small maple seedling growing from thespot where we buried our prairie dog so many years ago. I imagine its delicate whitebranching root as the heart of our dead Couscous, and the living heart insidethe empty chest of that small dead animal, who once was nothing but warmth andthe fiercest desire to dig, but who is now kept alive only in the form of thesmallest tree, which I will yank from the ground before it is too big.
Dig hard enough and long, and you willfind it.

k.great
Plath puta small cloth under her head to cushion her cheek against the oven grate.
Such a delicate thought. If we believein death, we want it to have a sweetness to it, even if it is a sucking in,through the tiny slits of her nose, that sweet natural gas as if it were thealmost-too-strong-for-us scent of a fragrant and gaudy tropical flower.
Or: We believe sometimes, as poets ofthe unrestrained word, the word unrestrained by emotion, that the entry ofemotion is the harbinger of illth, that only the compassion of objectivity, therestructuring of the word according to proscribed (and also prescribed)patterns allows for a poetry with legs, one that will last, one that will walkon its own.
Yet we are grounded by the human insideus, which is a little blood-red muscle sometimes larded with fat, but whichbeats out the numbers of our lives, so much so that the music of our lives goesaccording to the pattern of that ostinato, neverending, ever-rending, untildeath, one that feels like a bastinado of our every footfall.
We are blood and breast and bone. Thesweet edible meat of our skulls makes all of that work, but we measure bymeasures, and we count them by beatings.

l.blizzards
almostdone with sleeping out my own personal blizzards
The winter has just begun, and the snowfalls, lightly, a dusting, confectioner's sugar, but we know the cold of it,the moisture trapped in the false form of whiteness.  The blizzard is blindness and comes sometimes as words.Enough of them, black little inklings, and the world turns white before oureyes. Too white to see.
I don't know what blizzards stop. Idon't know which blizzards stop. They return, or their replacements do, when we don't expect them, thepast merely preparation for the future, merely a different presentation of thefuture.
Maybe it is that blizzards are a sourceof poetry. That a blizzard of the personal life leads to a blizzard of right words,that the hardness of the cold, the wind blowing so hard, the snow pelting theface in surgings leads to a form of poetry, that the self's response to suchstimuli can be poetry. And, as you say, whatever helps the poetry is good. Ifpoetry is your goal, of course.
If poetry is anyone's goal.

m.dance
dancedance dance dance dance to the radio ("Transmission" by Joy Division)
I do have this song somewhere and canlisten to it when I want. It is a good song, but it's not the one I considerthe only good Joy Division song. The name "Joy Division" being a self-madeirony, the artists themselves being the self, and the art, the songs beingmerely the vague representations of self. (TheRepresentation of Self in Everyday Art. Read it.)
The song allows for dancing but doesnot demand it. And it demonstrates Joy Division's debt to the VelvetUnderground. We are haunted by influences, infected by them, infested, investedin them. When we write a line, it is a line of someone else's, a line stone, aline misheard into something else, a line reworked into something else, aseries of lines and a personal experience and someone we loved into something else.We are repetitions of the original, though, building complexity as we go.
Every work of art is a reference toevery other work of art that came before it, and the trick is to find theconnections. Only find the connections.
Everything begets everything else.
The music is better than the singing.It is all beats, music and lyrics, and Ian Curtis has a voice that refuses tolisten. I am curt, is I ?  (Now I'mlistening to all my Joy Division music, starting with "Love Will Tear UsApart." Believe it.)
How could we ever live in Warsaw? Couldwe ever appreciate cheese enough to live in Wisconsin?
I will have to leave you hanging.

n.ocean
theearly promise, the early educational rigor, the way none of it mattered to theocean
Say, "ocean," and I think so often ofthe Velvet Underground song, which is all atmosphere and no land, maybe becauseit is the sea, though foggy, so invisibly so.
So Melvillian, this idea, to beswallowed, as a pebble, by the ocean, recognized less than the death of an antto the mind of god. (There is the pearl of a thought in there somewhere.) Wewrite against a giant darkness of water that surges towards us. We are soslight, thin of bone and flesh, that we disappear into the first lapping ofwave, yet we go on because the choice is always simple: Yes or no. Do or don't.
As you might have wanted, at some pointto have an academic career, I had never, for a second, thought of being anacademic. I was vassal to the word alone. Going off to college for English,people asked me if I were going to teach. I always said, No, because that Nowas always the true answer. My goal was to write, and I went to college becausethat was the next step in the life I led, because we build up what we can do bywhat we know, because the ocean is big, so much bigger than us, but if we canknow it, know it completely, or at least to the greatest extent that we can,then we can ride the ocean, rather than allow it to swallow us.

o.radio
I'dlisten to the radio and wonder, "Is this all there is?" Plath was a hint atwhat might lie at the far end of my poetic transistor dial. Plath was the hintthough.   
"Rock and Roll," The VelvetUnderground. We are looking for something (meaning, connection), and theworking out of art is the working out of these pathways, which we then follow,but which we then hope others will follow. Everyone is lost in the woods. Weate all the bread because we were lost in the woods. No crumbs dropped for thereturn. We don't want to go home anyway. We want to make a new home, to find anew place to be, a new way to be. So we are searching.
Maybe some pathways move to Plath,maybe she is an answer. But when I read your words, I see the answer. It's not"Plath was the hint though."
It's "Plath was the hint through." 
We have to get through something, ormany things, we must get past them. And we have to find that way. And we haveto make that way for others.
As poets, as artists, we have to makethat way.
I am listening to the Feelies now,obsessively. Their hint through was the Velvet Underground, and you can hear itin them. I'd say their specific path was the Velvet Underground's eponymous thirdalbum. They have a delicate roughness to their sound. They are beholden totheir makers (Lou, John, Mo, and Sterling), but they are something else.Influence is a virus, but it is not so much a self-replicating virus as onethat changes constantly, one that mutates fast enough so that we cannot stopit.
Maybe I am infected by that same virusfrom the VU: Velvet Underground (my favorite band), Vanderbilt University (myalma mater), Volume Unit (the VU meter I saw as I played Lou Reed's "StreetHassle" Vanderbilt's student radio station, WRVU), déjà vu (all that I'vealready seen). Lou Reed and I even shared a teacher (Philip Booth) in differentdecades at Syracuse University. In the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," Lousings of "rules of verse," which I  had heard for years as "Rooseverse." Why the focus on theRoosevelts? I wondered.
Maybe that Rooseverse was just the signof the mutation.
Maybe that's what allowed me to be.

p.voice
thesearch for a poetic voice died, allowing my work to become much bigger, sinceit's no longer hinged on the self
I know that this is essentially apost-lyric, post-avant belief, but I don't see the self as being particularlylimiting or freeing, even though I see it as unavoidable. I look at ChristianBök's work, and I see Christian presented to me full bore. Mentioning not aword of himself, he is still fully presented in the poem. The self is thegenesis of all poetry and the conduit through which it comes to us.
I'm not arguing with you here. I'm justriffing off it, giving my own point of view. If I believed your statement here,I would have to conclude that your work is, logically, bigger (a vaguedesignation, I'll grant you) than Lynn Behrendt's, but I actually think bignessis more the domain of Lynn's work than yours. That messy presentation of theself produces her broad-brush expressionistic shipwrecks smashed against therocky shore of self, and these are larger events, in that emotional and sonicway, than yours.  Not morebeautiful, just beauty of a different, more visceral type.
Your size is atmospheric, ErikSatie-like, built upon the altar of repetition (the ground rock of minimalistmusic) and built upon the concept of music, so built upon the concept of time.I'd say Lynn's are more sculptural, monumental, physical, the solid form ofmatter. Her poems are of the instant, even when they are long. They are stringsof instants. We are hit with the size of her poems, but we walk through thesize of her. What hits us feels bigger. A fist as opposed to a mist.
These are the metaphorical forms ofyour voices, as a see them, hear them, feel them. Voices come in differentmanifestations, some even mute. A visual poet, and I am a visual poet when myeyes open each morning, cannot forget the power of muteness.

q.suttee
poetryshould be a cornering of the false self by the true self until a essential voicehappens…well, any poet would kill themselves too if they believed that, or wassurrounded by people who believed that. It's a form of suttee, a ritual killing. 
I read this as an overstatement, so Itake this as a rhetorical stance. But I think that using the word "suttee" suggeststwo things: that society and Plath's husband (as it is with suttees) is thecause of Plath's death, that she is exonerated from her own act ofself-immolation.
Everything, meaning existence ingeneral, pushes people to kill themselves, but in the end it is the act oftaking power over one's life, even if in the cause of ending it. It is theultimate act of self-control and it comes only after mere existence seems worthless.I don't look at suicide as most people do, though. I don't see it as a tragedy.I see it as a right, one that people take when they want nothing else, whenthey actually want nothing. It is cowardly in that it removes one's ability todeal with the pain of the world, but it is brave in that it is irrevocable,final. Your statement here reads to me as an exoneration of Plath. There'snothing to exonerate. It was her personal choice. The people she hurt were herchildren most of all. If she "could live with" that, then that was simply herchoice.
We create, we destroy, we must decidewhich action to end with.

r.rabbit-hole
Theentirety of her final work acted as a spoken spell for the final trap. Therewas no other way out. I'm so very grateful and glad to write in a time whenmythomaning isn't the only way into the poem. The self becomes a deadly, boringmatrix from which to begin. Deadly when it's the only one.
This idea that a focus on the self ledto Plath's death seems an argument just to prove a point, especially given thatit ties into the post-avant rejection of the self as an opening to possibility.I don't see any way to argue this point or to prove it. The self always is thereason for the suicide, because she is the self. The self doesn't disappear inpoems not absorbed by the self.
I still see the self suffusing your ownwork. You are the eye and voice, and it is you, no-one else.  I hear you in your poems, I hear yourvoice, I hear your words and how they sound like no-one else's. And some ofyour poems are simply representations of your experiences, though told in yourfuguelike way.  (And I realize theself is lost in the fugue. Contradiction is the nectar of argument.)
The self can be rejected, but notescaped. And I don't think rejection of the self is antidote to suicide. Afocus on the self might actually be a way to avoid suicide.
I must recognize the self as important,just because we are created by unique circumstances, meaning that each self hasthe possibility of making unique things. Whether the self is a focus or notdoes not matter. All that matters is that the self is—so that the creation isindeed possible. Possibility matters because the nurturing of possibility iswhat makes art.

s.Quietest
probablytoo smart and vibrant to languish as a Quietist poet
I doubt the people reading this will necessarilyunderstand this term. It does define things well enough, even though I thinkRon Silliman's use of it often requires an over-simplification of reality. Forinstance, I think WCW was very Quietist at times. That's the secret of hissuccess. But WCW cannot be Quietist because he railed against that strand ofpoetry in his attacks on TSE.
Whereas, I say, what we say and what wedo are never the same thing.
Why, I wonder, too, is the Quietist thequietest one? Why would the poet focused on personal experience necessarily bequiet. Wasn't Plath louder than most, and wasn't she also merely leaning out ofthe circle of Quietism? Isn't she the definition of the lyric poet? agreat-granddaughter of Sappho? Wasn't her loudness what made her work work? Wasn'ther self-making in her poems precisely her art?
My problem with "Quietism" is that theterm requires binary thinking. It makes the world of poetry black and white. Inthe world of microfilm, bitonal representation of documents is common; mostmicrofilm captures only black and white, no greys. Continuous tone microfilmthat captures the range of greys between the blacks and the whites is rare. Itcosts more. So documents are captured as black words on white paper, even whenthe paper is yellowed with age and the ink is brown.
Even if we cannot capture the fullcolor of the world in our representations of it, shouldn't we at least capturethe greys?

t. L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E
[stealing, via the title here, theone-word poetics of Dan Waber]
Plathmight have embraced L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E once she tired of the self as beginning.
Wishful thinking. I don't thinkanything like this ever would have happened. Otherwise, it would have happenedto Adrienne Rich. Most people set a course early and follow it through a seriesof changes, but they rarely veer onto other paths.
Should, maybe, Plath's daughter, FriedaHughes, then, have taken this, or some other, more adventurous path? Wouldn'tshe have been the one to grow?
But who grows much after becoming a completedadult? In childhood, we are caterpillars. In pubescence, we are chrysalises,asleep in ourselves but becoming. In adulthood, we are finally ourselves,butterflies of sorts, moths some of us, some small and flittery, some withgiant dust-green leaves that allow us to glide, to float, but we don't changeinto other forms afterwards, not into butterflies if we're moths. The world candamage us, we may be blown into a different field, or a small grey lot in acity, but we are essentially the same. Even when we do change, we almost alwaysstay within the boundaries of acceptable change.
Rae Armantrout changes almost not atall over a long career, forty-five years or so, probably more like fifty. Apoem from her first book would not look out of place in her last. And she is aLanguage poet, one for whom we might think there are no traps of poetictendency. Yet, even without significant growth, she is a great poet. LarryEigner continued with the same poetics of personal observation guided by alineated poetry centrally concerned with the mise-en-page, yet his change isminor over the course of decades of writing.  His lines do become shorter, his language more cropped, thediagonal leaning of his text distinctly more pronounced. But he did not escapehis own tendencies. Few of us ever do.
There's no hope of knowing the answerto your mulling, though, without the continued living of Plath. Only theexistence of self makes the possible real. Or makes real the possible.
I'm not sure there is a differencethere, but I can feel one.

u.possibilities
Thesign that makes up the boy / his possibilities in terrible detail
We make possibilities out of signs.That is how we know we are poets. My entire poetics, of which these few wordsto you are but a fragment of, I can reduce to that single concept: possibility.
Deciding that one brand of poetry issuperior to another has no value in my thinking. Value accrues at the level ofthe poem. Still, I would agree that some types of poetry produce fewer goodpoems, but why would that require us to avoid all exemplars that poetry?Shouldn't discrimination force us to do the hard work of finding those poemsworth finding in the broader spectrum of poetry?
Although my reading of poetry isomnivorous, even I tend to read poems in a particular realm, one where I ammore likely to find poems I enjoy, but to embrace possibility I have to embraceall poetries.
In my own work, you'll understand this.I am a visual poet. Most people think of me as such, as opposed to anythingelse. (Binary thinking always requires the making of a single choice.) But my poetryconsists of one-word poems, poems written in unintelligible scripts, poemspainted onto canvas or assembled within boxes, poems spoken or sung and audio-or video-recorded during the moments of their creation, poems created withinnature and left to disappear back into it, and even syntactic text separatedinto lines. Each of my poetry performances attempts to use the full extent ofmy body to examine the limitations of poetry. I believe in the body as thepoem, the poet as the poem.
I believe in poems that you can tasteand smell and feel. I believe in rhyme and punning. I believe in meter andhumming, in the beat of the line of the heart at the center of the poem. Ibelieve in the poem of an instant, of the eyeblink. I believe in the poem thatis books in length. I believe in the poem with no opening to see it. I believein the poem that folds open to greet you. I believe in life as the poem, theself as the poem. I believe in the eradication of self, the focus on the word,the power of the concept or the shape or the sound over the word as amesmerizing whole. I believe in the mesmerizing whole. I believe in the hole,in the gap, in praecisio, in the poem unsaid. I believe in precision. I believein disorder. I believe in the beautiful. I believe in the ugly. I believe inmusic, in architecture, in opera, in the Gesamtkunstwerk, in the smallest thingwith the biggest effect. I believe in the game, the joke, the jest. I believe,in all seriousness, in seriousness. I believe in the word, in the language, incommunication. I believe in acceptance. I believe in refusal. I believe inaccentual-syllabic rhymed verse. I believe in the poem without borders, thepoem without words, the poem without letters, the poem of images alone. Ibelieve in the forged poem and the authentic poem. I believe in the forged poemand the found poem. I believe in the improvised poem, the aleatoric poem. Ibelieve in the made poem. I believe in the found and aleatoric poem. I believein the poem as a drawing, as a photograph, as the description of a poem nevermade. I believe in the poem carved into the flesh.
I believe in poetry. I believe inpossibility.

v. joy
what Ilistened to: Joy Division
Sorry about expending your time with whatmust seem like argument. I'm not a partisan myself (though I'm a member of aspecific brigade), so I don't come to poetry from one pole of binary thought. Idon't believe in experimentalism. Or the avant-garde. Or the hope fororiginality, or even unoriginality, both of which are impossible. My focus ison possibilities. My focus is plural, not singular, so it leads me to differentconclusions, or the rejection of conclusions in somecases.
Somethinkers require that their thinking be replicated, that their thoughts bebelieved, because they know the real truth, the false truth having beenuncovered by them. I have no need to be believed, or even a need, really, toargue. I place my thought in front of another's thought for the purposes ofcomparison and contrast. I desire that my thought is known, but the mirroringof my belief in another is not important to me. If my belief creates adisjunctive thought in another, I have helped carry forth the process ofthinking, and that is the best I can hope to want.
Itake joy in these divisions of ours.

w. unlearning
I had to unlearn most of what I learned there.
Unlearningis most of learning.  Be happy forthe opportunity to unlearn, which was made possible only by the originallearning.
Learningis just a way of talking about the representation of experience within aperson's memory. And experience is the important thing. We can make only out ofour experiences. It's not that our experiences have to be directly representedin our poems, but the broader our experiences, the greater our possibilities,so we must learn everything we can, everything wrong, everything right, everythingunknowable, everything accepted as fact but impossible to be true, andeverything we think we have forgotten but which we carry within our body as anunheard pulse.
Unlearningis a sifting. We sift through what we have experience, and we dispense with it:the insignificant others, the signs of distress, the truths we cannot accept,the falsehoods we cannot abandon, the children we have, the children we didn't,the children we lost, the pain, the pleasure, the abandon. Whatever it is wedon't want. And we simply don't believe in it anymore.
But,you know, we never abandon anything. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, the ending of it:
Because we don't know whenwe will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everythinghappens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. Howmany more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, someafternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive ofyour life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yetit all seems limitless.
Whatwe think we don't ever think about is what we never forget. What we haveforgotten is all we will ever know.

x. intestate
Plath died undivorced and intestate, so theHugheses control her estate. 
Shewas born intestate.
Ihate this kind of control over information, which has been the same for Salinger,and to some degree  from Paul Zukofskyvis-a-vis his father.  As anarchivist, I desperately want records be used and for something else to be madeout of them. I want people to gain insight by the records we preserve.
WhenI donated my papers to a university library (almost ninety boxes of it now, notcounting eighty-five boxes of books about words), I put no restrictions on anyof it. My private letters to people, the evidence of my successes and myfailures, the geneses of my poems, their exoduses, their final (conceptual)immolations, my work, my life, my art, evidence of my shallow footprints, noteven as deep as a shadow, upon the face of the earth are available for anyoneto see and use, to make knowledge of, and not at all necessarily about me. Weare not separable individuals; we are individual parts of different wholes. Soit is that my papers give evidence of what an archivist was, what a poet was,what a 1980s zinester was, what the literary underground was, what thenocturnal artist was, what it is, maybe what it might be, what a mailartist is,what a family was, what it wasn't, even what I was, what I might have been,what I always had failed to be.
Somany of the donated papers of individuals (imagine the papers of politiciansfor a moment) and of organizations are no longer corporeal wholes. They havebeen gutted. Their skeletons are left, and that exterior shroud we call theskin, but the heart has been removed, and the spleen. My papers are notcleansed or sanitized. Everything is there. It is my memory, my own memory ofmyself, a memory becoming hazier now in my second half-century of life, and Idon't want it lost. I say that I cannot regret my life, not my shortcomings,not my failures, not my disasters (you must try, sometime, losing control of acar approaching 100 miles an hour and turning and turning and turning, inmotion so slow you can count each hair on the back of your hands, until yourcar slams backwards into a telephone pole, and you are still alive and totallyunhurt until the police officer snaps open that membrane of skin clinging to yourskull with a billy club).
Ibelieve in openness. The truth of the matter. The inability to sidestep a badlife. The need to accept what cannot be escaped.
Similarly,I believe in fair use, the practice of taking something and reasonably makingsomething else with it. I believe in copyright, but with restrictions, andnever permanent. Copyright, as it is now practiced (as an act of aggression) inour culture may be the death of art, and the weakling we call poetry might bethe first to go. Those who try to control the future by controlling theevidence of the past eventually lose, but rarely soon enough.

y. I(art)
I… One reason you are my friend isbecause you understand that art is supposed to make more art.
Quoting:"Could you turn it [that camera] off? This is not art. This is life!" (CharleneSwansea to Ross McElwee in his film Sherman'sMarch [1966], repeated in his film TimeIndefinite [1993])
Artcomes out of art. I art art. To be that art, there can be a lifelessness. Focusis both nourisher and depriver of nourishment. But could artlessness be better?Is balance better or the abrogation of responsibility? Or are we—I shudder tothink—beset with too many responsibilities (personal, familial, societal,human, profession, artistic) but with no way of meeting each? Is time soindefinite to us that we live fully whatever life is closest to us because wedo not know when it all will end? Is our only thought, the only mover of anaction, the realization that we cannot recall our beginning but that we knowour end without ever seeing it? Are we ready for the surprise of thatrealization?
Canan art be made well without the obsession to make it too much, too often, toocompletely with the body and the mind? Does that create a friendship of artthat occludes a friendship of the beating, or beaten, blood?
Inthese terms, I think of Robert Creeley, who, one-eyed most of his life, sawwithout any depth but guessed at it from the size of things, who could not seethe dimensions of things, their particular roundnesses, and how light,therefore, wrapped around them, who wrote a crabbed line, in fits and stops,and clawed from that language an originality that befalls the smiths of theleast word, a focus borne forth from an inability to focus elsewhere. I thinkof the human evidence in these poems of his, amulets, maybe, possibly histalismans against his leftward focus, maybe touchstones to prove his connectionto three families. All of this in a string, as every life is, a pulled threadtaut enough through the cloth so that it holds two pieces together. But whatholds in place that thread? What threat did he encounter from the living oflife that the living of art protected him from?
CanI be a friend without being also a poem?

z. ☞☞☞☞☞☞

 really gets me thinking about this stuff—the relationship ofour work to our selves, how the self might emerge in the work, is that animportant goal/endpoint or a moment?
Weare only here for thinking and for making people think and for allowing them todo the same with the little thoughtthings we create.
Ilive by building something atop something else. My poetry is a poetry ofaccretion, but all poetry is. It is merely the fact that I have been able tolive on the beach in the Caribbean, close enough to snorkel out into thosebands of blue ending in ultramarine, and to swim among the corals and to watchthem build their cities atop one another—it is only that that pushes me harderin this direction. I know no other way, and unlike coral I am mobile.
SoI build these words, a poetics, upon relationships, comparisons, extensions. Iam divesting myself of words, of memories, of thoughts. Put enough words down,and I might find I have come to the end of talking, of writing. Or not. ElieWiesel once wrote, "I write to understand as much as to be understood." JohnSteinbeck once said that he wrote in order to know what he thought. Maybe I writeto understand what I think. Or to confirm it.
Iam sapiens, thinking, made for it. Poetry is made for the thinking, for thetinkerer, for the engineer. We set free these contraptions of words to travelwhere they might and mean as they can. Comprehensibility is not ensured. Success is unlikely. Yet the travelentrances.
We still have the thinking, we still have the thinking ofit, the thinking through. The thread, the line of thought, the impulse in thepulse of a thought.  The reason Irarely publish anything is that publishing is an act unrelated to thinking. Itis not the thing I want. I want the writing, the writhing body at the desk, thewrinkling of the brow in contemplation's temple. All poetry is a philosophy,sometimes ecstatic, sometimes subdued, sometimes considered, sometimesslapdash. 
These words are a poetics, a poetry, a philosophy, a person.
Me. I am still here, self, selfless, and selfishing. Mywords are indistinguishable from me and will persist, at least for a whileafter me. Yet persistence doesn't matter, not mine in trying, not my words instaying, in remaining present, even in the future. What matters is theexperience of the thought, the running-through of an idea.  The richness of that intellectualexperience, that purely human living in the realm of the abstract, the concept,the idea.
In that way, we go forward.
Followthe fist: forward.