Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

If you believe that poetry is about the celebration of language then poetry whether written or spoken exists in a multitude of forms.    Contrary to many people's view, I believe poetry is a very welcoming, wants to embrace the variety of work being produced in its name, but too often I'm meeting minds that want to be prescriptive rather than descriptive with the term.   To be prescriptive with "poetry" is to say, "I like poetry, but what "they" are doing is merely rant, or yelling, or just prose with a lot of bombast," or "not poetry."   To be descriptive is to say, "I don't have a definition.   If someone wants to call what they do poetry, that's fine by me."   To be descriptive is to strip institutions of their power, their cultural capital, to decide how, what, and why artists create.   Too often, our institutions (cultural and educational) celebrate the models that conform to their prescribed notions and mock art th...

Addressed as “Dearest” except when young, at five, from Birkenhead, he wrote. They were making huts, “I have got a lantern, and we are lighting them up tonight. With love from your Wilfred, I remain your loving son…” Six years later he writes again. “We went to lantern service… I don’t think I told you Mr. Moore’s text… It was Pilate’s sermon, as he called it: `Behold the man,’ He told us a lot about Pontius Pilate, & then about `The Man’. The last day of nineteen-oh-eight, “Dorothy Leslie the Cates & I took the toboggan to Peppard Common,” and simply had, “a splendidrippinggrandmajesticgloriousdelightfulscrumtiousexquiesitelyexcruciating time…” Tea will be ready soon. Dearest Mother. “My dearest Mother, Many, many thanks for your long letter. Do please call upon the Canon and ask about the fees… …Very disagreeably as experience is forcing upon me the fact that money must purchase even such pleasures as good books… [I] regard the life whose sole aim is money-making to b...

At mile marker six, I spot a raft hung up, abandoned. Its gray ends flapping against the current like a sweating dog's tongue. The wind is my only external companion as I try to remember how to use all the 24 gears at my disposal. Other cars, most loaded with rafts overtake me or meet me on the road, but the SUV with the two kids waving at me out their back window-- a mixture of awe and revery strikes me as entirely fitting. There's so many adjectives that I could use, and I could load a sentence down with metaphors yet only create something that while new, neither adequately describes this area or soars enough off the page to make these words more than merely evocative or imitative. Words, despite the pretense and lie of insisting they were the beginning are just our way of understanding, piercing our perception of reality and making it make sense. If our awakening consciousness was the "word," then the sentence, the poem-- was ...

About ten years ago, I came up with the following idea:  what if I wrote with my left hand?  I suspected my penmanship would improve over time as I became more versatile with it, but would what I wrote and how I wrote about subjects change? As a general rule, the left hand is connected to the right hemisphere of the brain and the right hand is connected to the left hemisphere of the brain.   Would this be noticeable in my writing?  I don't know.   So in April I begin this rather unscientific study by, most mornings, just simply writing in a big sketch book with my left hand. April 4th, 2011 The idea that my writing, my penmanship, will improve is a hopeful one. Another one is the idea that I'll tap some otherwise unused portion of my brain because my left hand is wired differently than my right. Science supports the idea of different hemispheres connected to left and right, but surely it it thinks much, much faster.  It might even be faster...

On Being a Writer                 I’m not sure why, but at an obviously weak moment when I was 17 years old I sat down at my desk and wrote a story.   And after no editing, revising, creative writing classes, or real encouragement from any real writers or teachers, no ambition, discipline or any reasonable degree of aptitude  announced –to myself mostly –and my best friend, “I want to be a writer.”                 I wish I’d never uttered that phrase.   Some ____ years later, I’m saddled with the weight of that phrase.   I had no idea what I was getting into.   I mean, this is America.  No one really writes anymore, or at least how I imagined writing to be.   Stephen King or Mary Higgins Clark don’t write; they work:  8 hours a day, complex formulas, books out on deadlines, b...