i spent all of mfa party school hearing the phrase...

i spent all of mfa party school hearing the phrase “negative capability” thrown around like an amen, but i never knew what the phrase itself meant and never cared to look it up, even though my poems were said to contain negative capability. 

after mfa party school, just a few months ago, i looked it up and now i forget what it means. i remember it has something to do with keats.

now i look it up again. on wikipedia, the first sentence from the negative capability article reads, “Negative capability describes the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts.” 

keats describes it as, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

now i find myself a year and three months out of finishing my mfa party school degree, without a job and without much partying. 

i console myself by searching my grandmother’s yard for spiders and other tiny life. i’m a big fan of the spiny orb-weavers, and i check in every day on the banana spider and its massive web. i appreciate the mud dauber’s nests that resemble organ pipes made with red georgia clay. i’ve successfully treated (exterminated) several fire ant mounds, near where the dog gets tied up, and a yellow jacket nest next to the garage.

i find myself wishing i could be an expert on spiders, specifically web-building. 

i’ve exorcised some shit writing a chapbook of twelve poems called orb-weaver, where i attempted to write poems of nineteen lines that i wrote all at once, a line at a time, while cycling through the twelve poems in a notebook. now i’m trying to decide whether to revise the form, which was originally intended to resemble the beautiful webs of these spiders, and let the poems take on their own lengths and shapes, and move away from the form they were intended to tribute. 

it seems silly, and maybe it should be. i’ve always used poetry to try and push myself toward better realities, to use the poem as a new form of natural beauty, more specifically through the images and conjectures that a poem contains. a form should be able to rewrite itself much in the same way. let the content determine the way the poem settles on the page/screen/etc, much like the shape of a spider web is determined by the natural and man-made structures the spider chooses to build between.

i know how to create lines, but it’s finding the appropriate structures, which has been a struggle lately, to tie them to, to realize that there is no perfect form, only the poet’s task to make lines between the quivering branches of an ever-shifting reality.