Mornings Are For Writing

As usual, on this roadtrip that I am on this winter—traveling to the Southwest, then California, then back through the northern Rocky Mountains—when I feel like writing, I do so in my handwritten journal. It's more portable than any technological aid, in that I can just open it up and write. I do now have iPad and iPhone, but these do not have keyboards that allow me to type as fast as the words come; one must be more deliberate, more thoughtful, less spontaneous. So as usual I am writing in my journal, when I feel like writing. Usually a journal entry or poem—or, these days, a song lyric—every few days. I have never been a daily diarist; I usually only write when I have something I want to say, or transcribe, or just get down in words.

One of the facets of my creative process that has become clear to me on this roadtrip is less a revelation than a crystallization of tendencies already known, just not codified or stated clearly, before.

Mornings are for writing. The rest of the day is for more non-verbal art-making.

On a roadtrip, that usually means photography, video, maybe a little music-making. But mornings are for writing.

•

I have now been on the road a full month, with another week to go. I've had extended visits with friends, long stays where I could relax and just be on vacation. This is the first major roadtrip since my surgery last summer. It was a bit of a risk, as I didn't really know if I was up to the challenge. Dealing with the ostomy bag while traveling has often been easy and unproblematic; a few times it's been irritating, once or twice it's been downright annoying. I change the appliance every three or four days, as usual, no matter where I am; staying for a week with a friend means changing it twice. When I am irritated with the bag, it's usually because I'm out trying to hike or work on my photography, and it gets in the way.

There have been a few days of complete meltdown, emotionally. One important goal of this trip has been to have a real vacation—to return refreshed, relaxed, and recharged—and that has sometimes been a challenge. Some days I have questioned why I ever left home. But mostly I am indeed getting refreshed, mentally and spiritually, after the long painful time preceding, when I was sick unto death, had a few near-death moments, the first surgery, and recovery. What I've come to realize is that the emotional meltdowns are mostly, not entirely but mostly, the resurgence of emotions I didn't have time for, earlier, when mere survival was more urgent.

It's a sign that in fact I am relaxing, that these feelings should be safe to re-emerge. No few of them have been of the category of Oh my god they cut me open and took out my colon! That sort of thing. There is grief tangled up in there, and lots of upset coming from the basic-self level: the youngest inner self who has been unable to understand such violation. So I have spent a lot of time with basic self, reassuring, doing Reiki, etc. So far, so good.

I am getting a lot more physical exercise than I have in years—and I'm able to do so, which please me enormously. I can hike with cameras all day long, and just be "normal tired" at the end of the day, not "illness tired," which often left me so exhausted it took four days to recover. On this roadtrip I have done a lot of hiking, with no ill effect. One day I spent wandering all over San Francisco, carrying a backpack full of camera gear, and was tired, but not desperately so; and I was fine the following morning. So physical changes are continuing, and many of these are good changes.

•

Throughout this roadtrip, I have often felt on the edge of a creative surge: something lingering just around the corner, just out of sight, wanting to emerge. In fact, it hasn't emerged, and has probably been wiped out a few times by social occasions and by general travel tiredness. Or in fact it has already emerged, but not in an anticipated form, but some other form. I have written a couple of poems, a couple of song lyrics, a fragment or two of music. I have practiced my own songs, written prior to the roadtrip, which I need to perform when I get back home. I have struggled a great deal on this trip with impatience and expectations. I genuinely don't have the same kind of toxic expectations I used to have; nonetheless, I have been short-tempered with delays, or when presented with abject stupidity from those around me. A little short-tempered about thoughtless or inattentive behavior from other drivers, other people. That was really starting to build up towards the end of my California stay. Now that I've been back in the empty desert for a couple of days, much of it has again fallen away.

Yet I realize now that what I am really impatient with is complacency, with inattention, with those who choose to march along with the status quo, rather than work to make the world a finer place. Starting with themselves, by enacting right action, by embodying right livelihood. I have found myself being very much more judgmental than I usually am, than I like to be. It's rooted in my knowledge of my own mortality: We're only here for a short while, folks, so quit wasting time and get busy. If I have become a kind of activist again, it's because I've been reminded, through my own brushes with death, just how urgent and necessary taking action is. It always has been. Most people have the luxury of being able to ignore their own mortality, to be complacent with their status quo lives—till confronted with change, death, and necessary wisdom. How often I have become impatient simply with willful ignorance, with the desire to deny what's right in front of us! I admit it. I own it. It doesn't have to be a problem. It just is. I feel sad at how many people choose never to awaken. I suppose this is one of the emotions I have been releasing, on those darker days emotionally that I've been experiencing: this nearly-judgmental desire to get people to just Wake Up. It causes me more suffering than I'd like. I'm working on it.

•

I have been full of doubts. The illness and surgery gave big hits to my certainties, to my sense of self, to my self-confidence, even to my self-esteem. I still feel like I am having to rediscover everything I once thought I knew, to examine it all over again, and see if any of it still works for me. Much of it doesn't.

I wrote the following some weeks ago, when I was still in New Mexico, revisiting places that had once meant a lot to me, when I lived near Taos, when I spent time around the region:

I don't know how I feel about my photo/video work this trip. I feel detached and disconnected sometimes. I feel more connected when I'm by myself, in the middle of nowhere, working alone, in the silence. That's how I'm going to try to spend the day today. I will wanter the land a couple of times today, revisiting and making images. It's necessary for me to be alone in the desert silence, to make good images—maybe that's not strictly true, but it's what I feel today.

I am uncertain if any of my art is any good. That's been a growing feeling lately. Life is very uncertain lately, and so is art.

Nonetheless it seems that other people like my art, sometimes a lot. So for now I can't be objective and assess my art for myself. Which I guess is some kind of normal. The problem is, what to trust.

The only thing I can think of to do is: just keep doing it. Keep making images. Keep making video, keep making art. Just keep producing art, keep going. Figure the rest of it out later.

Keep going on this roadtrip, keep scattering images as I go. Keep stopping for beauty, keep capturing beauty. I think of Ansel Adams on his various roadtrips, and I feel a kinship there. We continue to have a lot in common: music, photography, prolific art-making, forward momentum.

I never want to stop. Retirement is a stupid idea. I might slow down at times, but never stop. I want to be making art the day I die.

•

A few days later, when I was doing photography in Zion National Park in UT, after having spent the night in Page, AZ, then driving across the desert, I wrote:

Today a creative gear-shift day. Started out with poems, then when I began taking photos, the words slowed and dried up. Spent most of the day driving and making images.

And I got out and listened to the desert silence a few times, which was very fulfilling.

•

Then it all crystallized, a day or two later, when I was camping for two nights at Joshua Tree National park in California. I wrote in the morning, after camping the first night:

I'm a poet getting old:
I only just now figured out
that mornings are for writing,
the rest of the day for
more non-verbal arts.

An ars poetica of sorts.

•

And that's the way it's been going, on the rest of this roadtrip. If a poem comes to me, it comes first thing in the morning. (Usually. The creative imp is perverse enough that on the very day that I wrote in my journal that I didn't feel like writing poems any more, I got two poems and a song lyric, an hour later. Go figure.)

So, mornings are for writing. The rest of the day is for other arts.

And so we go on, and keep going, keep making. And see where the road will lead us next.

Writing Through

Really Not Interested

I was just away for five days. Five days away from home, right now, is still a lot. It still takes careful planning and adjustment and preparation, because five days away means dealing with changing the ostomy bag at least once. I thought I had everything accounted for, but in my travel pack of supplies I somehow overlooked a critically essential ostomy supply, and had to run out to the truck where I had my back supplies; or I would have been in serious trouble. It all worked out okay, but it was a bad start to the day. That supply-chain oversight will be corrected in future equipment and travel plans, making this into a shakedown cruise for how the system will work for future roadtrips.

But that's only a symptom. The disease is overwhelm: Too many things to remember, to do, to have to deal with, to make the right preparations for.

My personal dietary needs during the process of post-surgery recovery have changed yet again. I was getting frustrated for awhile because it felt like every time I got a system organized and ready to roll, some new wrinkle would make me have to start all over again.

While I was on the road, I thought about sitting down to write my thoughts out, to work through some feelings that had come up, some conversations during the trip that were beneficial and helpful to me. But I absolutely was not interested.

I'm still not interested. I'm only writing this down now as a way of observing my own creative process, and it's the middle of the night near a full moon and I'm having insomnia, and know from experience that it's better for me, when I'm having insomnia, to get up and do something, rather than lie in bed and let my thoughts churn. That only makes the insomnia worse. I haven't had much insomnia in the past few months. Yet during this full moon, this is the second event of restless sleeplessness.

So: I was on the road, lots was happening, there as a great deal wot think about and do, and I was absolutely not interested in writing about it.

First, there were a lot of new changes to write down, a bit of fresh healing brought to me, some of which I haven't integrated yet. I could write about that, but such writing would be flailing at the still-unknown, incoherent and tentative, and I don't want to commit anything to words. That's the sort of writing you do as venting into a private journal that no-one is ever going to see: just to get it out of your system. I've done enough of that lately to choke a vampiric equine. I'm sick of it. I've been dealing with PTSD, yes, and I've needed to vent a great deal, but at the moment that is not a productive means of venting. Might as well just break all your pencils into little pieces: it would feel about the same.

Second, I am not now and never have been keeping a daily diary or logbook. I don't do a daily diary. I never have. Not even when I began journaling. I've never kept any kind of daily diary and never want to. (The appeal of posting one's continuous activities several times a day on some social networking website strikes me as a cross between abject narcissism and a reflection of the empty hollowness of most peoples' lives: that they would need to go out of their way to make their lives appear to be interesting is a sad commentary on how dull they really are. Facebook is the dreariest imaginable form of autobiography.)

Correction: I am keeping a daily logbook of things I need to write down in order to track my medical and weight-loss progress; but that's incredibly dull stuff no one ever needs to see, not even the doctors who require me to do it. The entire purpose of tracking such details as what I eat and what exercise I do is purely to deepen my own conscious awareness to the purpose of managing my life with more awareness and purposeful choice. It's a good thing for me to do, in the sense that one is making conscious life-style changes for one's future benefit, but literally nobody ever wants to read it.

Third, and most importantly, I found myself absolutely not interested in writing anything down. Anything. I always have my written journal along with me on roadtrips. Lately I've been using large-size artist's sketchbooks with unlined pages. I write freehand on the blank page, and there's room on there for drawings or poems as sidebars should I wish to do so. Lots of poems have begun in the handwritten journal, and will continue to begin there. The past few poems I have completed have been written in this journal, rather than at the keyboard, breaking a pattern that had begun to ossify and instilling new life and new interest in the process of writing itself.

But I'm barely writing poems these days. All my energies are going into completing the new music commission, which I am at the moment days or weeks away from concluding. Even though I was busy with concerts, meetings, dinners with friends, hanging out, and having good talks with fellow artists and musicians about our lives and work, I managed to write two new pages of final score one morning while on the road. I also spent an extra day or two on the return trip to travel into the woods and make photographs and video. And I made a few other kinds of artistic stops as well. But that's all event-based material I could log and chose not to.

Fourth and finally, I realized I was resistant to writing things down because I was beginning to feel obliged to. What am I writing a journal for? Is it to record my own thoughts on the creative process, to watch my own mind (yes, for me a kind of Zen self-awareness practice not unlike watching one's thoughts during meditation, not to cling to or catalog them, but to let them rise and fall away without clinging to them, to regard them as substanceless as cloud-shadows moving across the ground on a blustery day), to keep a record for my own benefit of what I am thinking and doing? Mostly, that's what my journal is. It's not required that I write it. I write it for my own needs, not for an audience. If I don't feel like writing in it just now, what penalty is there? Where does this sense of obligation arise?

It arises I think in part from attachment. Attachment to writing essays here, even, that generate comments. Attachments to being a public intellectual, a poet who shares his poems on this and other venues rather than hoarding them all for some illusion of official print publication no-one cares about and no-one will ever read. Writing poems and essays is something I do, but it's not even my most important form of art. Writing this new music commission these past several months has underlined the truth that music is the central form of art in my life, and that when I am musically satisfied I don't feel any desire to write anything else anyway. Much less a poem. Not to say that poems don't happen; and there are always haiku falling off the back of the wagon as we ride forward down the rutted highway. But these are almost like accidents, little sports of nature, discovered like one suddenly sees a rare color of flower when passing by an overgrown hedge. They just sort of happen, without even thinking about it.

Bollocks to the idea that "art is self-expression." There are many occasions on which I don't feel like expressing any aspect of my self, and still make art. If anything, making art for me is overtly anti-self-expressive. It's often enough about anything but "expressing my self." It's often about transcendence, or overcoming the little self, that personality-ego self that likes to imagine it's in charge and much bigger than it really is, but is actually rather clueless, and often the last to learn anything really important. Letting go of the self is one of the projects of (my) art.

So here I am, writing about not wanting to write anything down. Note that I still haven't generated any interest in writing about the five-day roadtrip. Maybe later on some aspect of the trip will be worth mentioning. I did make some new experiments in infrared photography that were fun and interesting.

Truthfully, I wish I was still out on the road. Some of this insomnia is typical of first nights home after a roadtrip, when I want to still be traveling, not having yet arrived. Some of the discontent I felt during the middle of this short trip was about feeling stuck, mentally, rather than feeling the freedom of the open road. I guess I'm still a nomad at heart.

I stayed in a budget hotel in Wausau last night that was surprisingly sedate and comfortable, with a bed that was surprisingly easy to rest peacefully on. The first two nights of the trip, staying with friends in Minneapolis, when the weather was hot and pleasant, especially for October, I slept on the futon on their front porch, and slept deeply and peacefully. Indeed, it was like camping in a tent: just enough breeze and fresh air and sounds coming into the porch to be like tent-camping at a national park somewhere. I slept the best I had since the surgery, on some level. Freedom of open air spaces. Also freedom of not being stuck at home. Cabin fevre has been a major issue since the surgery. Feeling trapped and confined to home-based routines necessary but unloved. Having to take some of those routines along with me, on the road, is no doubt part of the discontent I felt at times. Love me, love my ostomy. Bollocks.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to intensive writing of words and music for the commission. This short roadtrip has not really been a departure, even though it was a mini-vacation. The roadtrip was all about creativity, and music, and art, and talking with artists, and making photographs and music. My musician friend and I jammed and recorded what we played for a few hours one afternoon. We then went to a terrific concert together. On the trip overall I did some music and art myself, I made some new images, I wrote some music, and I didn't write about "my feelings," not even once. Still not interested in doing that. Or in "self expression." Nothing's more boring right now than the self that no longer is, and will not be again. The self that is gone, and won't come back. The new self is as yet uncertain and unknown, but I'm tired of having to create it, to think about it all the time. People who think that making art is all about "self-expression" really know nothing about making art. That myth about art-making is one of the most toxic, pernicious, and flat out wrong ideas about making art ever perpetrated by any critic.

In just this moment I realize that one important reason I don't want to catalog the changing self right now, why I have no interest in journaling my thoughts and feelings, is that I've been doing too much of that since the surgery. I'm tired of it. The real vacation aspect of this short roadtrip has been a vacation from that relentless self-regard and self-cataloging that I've been forced to do in recent weeks, trying to get the all the systems in line for the next phase of recovery and preparation for the next surgery. I'm tired of thinking about all that all the time. I'm tired of being told what I must do. I'm tired of watching what I eat. I need a break from the endless self-examination and self-regard.

I took the opportunity of this short trip to take a break from myself.

Any moments of discontent while on the road were very much about those times when I was unable to get outside myself and those necessities I must undertake but am not in love with. Love me, love my ostomy. Its endless relentless demands on my attention. Its joyless repetitious needs. Medical necessity be damned, dealing with the ostomy bag is no fun, it's not creative, it's cheerless. There's a quality-of-life issue in operation here. I don't ever get bored with making art, but I'm really bored with the medical self-care tracking and necessities right now. If I need a continued vacation from anything, it's from that. Even the PTSD had become a chore and a bore. The happiest parts of this small road-trip were when I was out there making art, or talking to fellow artists, or engaged with music. When every other concern fell away into silence. When I was not thinking about what I was supposed to be doing, or otherwise scrutinizing my self so thoroughly.

This past morning, drenched in fog and mist in northern Wisconsin, I was at a beautiful country park, the Dells of the Eau Claire river, a rough exposure of blocky bedrock over which a fast stream pours, across rapids, and into narrow channels defined by tall standing stones. I was making video and stills, and just listening to the silence filled by the sound of the water, a bluejay nearby calling out periodically, crows in the distance, and a small blue-fletched bird skipping from pine branch to lichen-covered rock. The clouds parted to the north, showing some feathered blue sky. The pine tree smell was thick. Underneath was a thick orange carpet of fallen oak leaves wet with dew and rain. I was in heaven.

Most of the morning I had this natural wilderness park to myself. At one point, a man walked by, smiling, and we agreed that it was a glorious day, a beautiful day, and a spectacular place to be. He was an intimidating man to look at walking briskly towards you on the trial, looking like a rough biker or a tough dockworker, but he was lit up from within, soaked up in all the natural beauty around him, and I felt an instant connection with him during our very brief encounter. Certainly he could see what I was doing, draped with cameras and hauling a tripod and shoulder bag, but we just exchanged our appreciation for the day and parted ways, glowing a bit more in unspoken companionship.

An hour later, I was just finishing filming, was tired, was ready to finish up for now, hike back to the vehicle and drive on. An older man and woman were prowling the rocks now. The man had already, a little while ago, walked into one of my shots, completely oblivious, as he restlessly prowled over the rocks, not really stopping to look at anything, just skimming the view. The woman now came up to me on the trail and asked me what there was to see around here. Isn't there anything to see around here? Isn't there supposed to be a high bridge in this area? Completely flabbergasted, I nonetheless calmly replied that we're standing in one of the most beautiful places in this region, and there's plenty to look at right here. I waved my free hand at the lichen-covered boulders, the piles of green moss at the bases of the pines, the rushing river. But my reply went right past her and left no mark. She was fixated on man-made tourist attractions, apparently, wanting to make another notch in belt of collecting the sites and sounds of tourist attractions, and seemed unable to appreciate the beauty that she was standing in the midst of. Or so it seemed. She wanted to see something more, I don't know, dramatic. I told her I didn't think there was anything like that around here, but directed her towards the nearest large town, a good two hours drive away, feeling no guilt whatsoever about this blatant misdirection. If that's really what you're looking for, so be it. Rarely have I been so astounded by the human presumption that every human is as self-absorbed in the works and ways of man, as though nothing else was even worth looking at. People with blinkered attitudes like that about natural beauty could stand at a banquet and still starve. It makes me think, in this late night writing, that there is a strong parallel between the human need for self-congratulation regarding our material achievements as species, and this tracking of self-aware logbook diet and exercise details that I have been told I need to do to advance my personal health and recovery. Both seem to demand an equivalent self-regard, and not in a good way.

Self-regard of the constructions of civilization versus appreciation of the world's glorious depth and possibility, each moment the start of a new day full of ripe vision. I know which I'd prefer, given any choice on any given day. As for the other, I'm really not interested.

Journal Poems

My handwritten journal, where most of my poems begin, especially when I'm on the road, camping, or otherwise out in the wild and away from electricity and its amenities, is a 8x12 unlined artist's sketchbook. I've used lined journals in the past, since I've kept a journal for going on 30 years now, but for the past few years, I've liked these large-format unlined artist's books because they allow me to draw, do calligraphy, write, or mix it all together. I do drawings as well as journal entries and poems in this journal when I'm on the road. I also do drawings and writing at home, too. Not too long ago, for example, I spent a morning at a local coffeeshop, did a couple of drawings, and worked on a poem.

Just for fun, and total self-indulgence, here are two photos of my journal, showing the two-page first draft of a recent poem from the current series, that unnaming that takes us.





I note, looking at this first draft, how the title and the poem's center actually came last, almost as an afterthought. That's not unusual, actually. Sometimes you just have to start writing, not knowing where you're going, and not knowing where you're going to end up.

As I've said before, the title often comes last. I don't always know what the poem is "about," or what it's going to mean, when I start out. I follow the brush. I set out along a path unknown. I trust my intuition.

Sometimes I start with a simple image. Actually, I often start with an image. Poems often begin with images that come into my mind, like dreams, or like visions. I go on from there. Poems, especially haiku, also often begin with things seen during the day: a unique view, a certain slant of light illuminating the otherwise familiar, the shape of the land in the wild places far from anywhere.

Contrary to popular opinion, creativity is not a scarce resource.

It's infinitely available to all of us, all the time. The only that ever stops us is ourselves. Lots of folks don't think they can be creative, possibly because someone told them they were incapable of making art back in their childhoods, and just as often because their ideas about being An Artist are popular hokum that seems alien to their everyday lives. That's a misconception. We live in a universe full of creations new and unknown waiting to be discovered every day. We live in a place of infinite discovery. It's a mistake to believe that it only matters if it's human-oriented, or made by humans, or human-centric. I cultivate the garden around my house in part because it provides me with endlessly changing visual inspiration. All I have to do is go out and see, and things start to flow.

Writing a poem, just start with something. Don't pre-plan too often, or too much. Poems don't need outlines or footnotes; some poets do work that way, but it's not necessary, it's only one way to make a poem. Believe no poet who tells you that there is only one way to make poems: what they mean is that's the only way that they can conceive of making poems.

Just start with something. Look around you. Find an image to start from. Then go from there. You might throw away the first half of what you write, as just warm-ups, but at least it got you started.

It's self-indulgent of course to show a couple of poem pages from my own journal. I use them as an example, however, of the writing process I'm describing herein. This is a poem that I just started. I started with an image. By the end of the first stanza I knew what the form would be: five-line stanzas in a moderate-length, flexible line. Although, when the title came as an afterthought, I also realized that the title would change the form, and so I modified the poem's form at the last moment, as well. I added two single lines framing the five-line stanzas of the rest of the poem; each of the lines complete a line before; the first line completes the title as though it were a line in the poem. This was all afterthought. Yet now it seems inevitable. That's what happens when you follow the brush: form reveals itself during the writing. What you have to do is pay attention, and trust where the brush is leading you.

Brush Mind Poems

Two brush mind book poems, from my journal. Written on two different occasions, months apart, but following the same brush-mind to place brush pen to paper.



the black pitch
of the old boat

the old shorebound sailor
remembers, nodding by the fire

cold harbors, cold rooms
nights at sea when the mast iced

another log set on the hearth
cold bones never warm enough, growing colder

a gold cloud in summer
lee of the hummingbird's lair

falcons over sparrows
the shaved fields still fallow

the sun calls at last
to its lost boon companion

the fire's gone out, hands on the rocker
chair's arms as cold as the hearthstone

A bit of a memory of my grandfather, the sailor who left his home in Norway's Arctic seacoast north to emigrate to Michigan. But never leaving the sea, as the house he built in Muskegon was less than a mile from Muskegon Lake, and thus not far from the inland sea, Lake Michigan.

Also a bit of a poetic homage to that northern poet whose voice I keep finding in my own, whenever I write about norther things, about granite and sea and weather and the winter's cold: George Mackay Brown.

And looking back, written out of my own cold feelings, these past few months when the illness and anemia made me unseasonably shiver with chills.



blue twilight
fading evening light
evening star crystallizes
start of western sun
westing down to dusk
down darkening grove
darkening cardinal's red
cardinal ordained to weep
ordinal compass rose
risen eastern shine

Form emerging as the poem proceeds—just playing around with form and internal rhyme—middle rhyme becomes first word of next line, more or less. Making a sort of circle around the evening sky, as well as in the poem. (Probably need to drop that first line. Or maybe it's the title?)

•

I don't care about form. I think the contemporary obsession with poetry's formal craft is a symptom of having nothing to say. I don't go out of my way to find forms; although sometimes, like this, they arise organically out of the poem, during the writing process. Sometimes you emphasize that effect later. Sometimes, a form appears immediately upon starting the first line, like that feeling that emerges when you just know the phone's going to ring an instant before it does.

But I don't care about form: I care about the musical properties of rhythm, pattern, and silence. Those concerns can lead to generating form. But form is musical, generative, organic. It comes out of the poem itself, rather than being imposed upon the form beforehand. Let the dogs run. Don't hobble them before the gate's even open.

•

Maybe not great or even very good poems; seeds of something for later, perhaps. Examples of the brush-mind journal process. A lot of poems start this way for me, momentary inspirations and random scraps in the journal, then get revised into something better, later, or abandoned as not being worth it. Most poems that start this way need tightening; there's almost always a few words that clutter, or a line that's a warm-up line, something to get the poem going, to oil the gears, and needs to be dropped.

I could have used a stronger word than "dropped" to talk about revision. Excision, chopped, cut out, some other surgical or sculptural metaphor. How violently we describe the revision process sometimes; it makes me wonder if those writers who use violent metaphors to describe the writing and revising processes aren't accidentally saying something about self-hatred and self-esteem.

The creative writing process has to allow for less-than-stellar work as nobody writes winners every time; if an artist does try to convince you that they only make good work, they're either lying or self-deluded. Remember that most artists only show you their good work, not their work-in-process pieces. Remember too that finishing a piece can be an elusive process; sometimes you come back to it, years later, and finally know what to do, to make it come alive. Sometimes you just have to abandon it, and try again from scratch.

I find that for me, the poems that fall into the middle zone, between first/second drafts and coming back years later, are often the worst poems. I usually wait for a poem a strike. I don't go looking. And I learned long ago that trying to force a poem always, always turns it into an intellect-driven process, and kills any life in the poem itself. I can write to prompts, if I feel the gods and archetypes tapping on my shoulder. Otherwise, it's stale. I've said it before: poems written only from the head always fail. Precisely because there's no heart in them. So, I tend to find my best poems at the extremes: immediate appearance, done very quickly, not much revision; or long, long gestation followed by even longer revision. Sometimes waiting is everything. It's the poems in the middle, which you try to fix too soon, or which you over-revise, that end up dying. Some people like those poems, if they see them; but I usually don't.

Pen Drawings from Old Journals

Some random pen drawings, from my old journals. These drawings are basically just doodles, but still fun to look at. I don't consider them finished Art.

I used to do detailed line-drawings using Rapidograph technical pens. Pens that I first learned to use as a freshman student in geology, where we were expected to draw up our projects with precise, technical, draftsman-level skill; I spent hours on my project drawings, and I was the only student in the class who got a 100 percent grade for my project drawings. I used to make these kinds of drawings mostly on bristol board, which was firm enough and smooth enough to take the ink well without running, or watercolor board, for the same reasons. This ghostlike figure is the title page of one of those old spiral notebooks, a decoration for an English class notebook on creative writing.



This technical-pen style grew out of being able to draw extremely fine lines with the pen, combined with an interest in a pencil-and-paper math game called Sprouts, invented by one of those mid-century math-game geniuses I admired at that time, John H. Conway, who also invented the cellular-automata game Life. Believe it or not, I discovered Conway's games through reading science fiction novels such as Piers Anthony's Macroscope, then again in Martin Gardner's monthly columns in Scientific American. I liked the idea of using the Sprouts connectivity rules to control drawing style, and using the technical pens led my to explore this style throughout my college years.

The other drawing as done in my regular journal, half a page, using the Shaeffer fine-nib calligraphy cartridge pens I favored for many years, and still do. I have a backstock of pens and ink cartridges in my art-supplies chest of drawers next to the art desk.



This is just a moody journal drawing of the full moon and a planet close by in the night sky, done entirely in cross-hatch style. I was influenced to work with cross-hatching style by the great SF magazine illustrator Jack Gaughan, who was one of my favorite artists for several years at that time in my life. Looking up at the technical pen drawing, I can see some Gaughan influence in that, as well. It reminds me of one of his more abstract covers for Ace Books.

Old Journals 2

When I moved from my parents' house to my own house, about a year and a half ago, I put all my old journals into a plastic bin, to gather them all in one place, preserved. Someday, I plan to go back through some of those old journals to find poem fragments that I can recall leaving unfinished, which I want to work with at some point. There are also ideas for musical compositions, and some sketches in there. Like most journals, a lot of my old journals' pages are devoted to boring personal rants and ravings that no-one should care about, ranging from the incoherent to the near-essay.

I don't really want to get too far into the project of going through all these old journals right now, to mine their content, as that's too big of a Pandora's Box to get into while the weather is still good, and I want to be outdoors making photographs, or in the garage teaching myself woodcarving, or writing more new music. Perhaps over the winter, I'll get into the mining, since there are several months here where being outdoors is a cold prospect at best, an impossible one at worst. It will be an occasional process, most likely, mixed in with other projects. Better to go slow, and not be drowned by the tides of the past.

In recent weeks, though, I've been looking through the old journals for one specific set of writings. When I was in my mid-teens, just beginning to explore my sexual identity, in secret, in private, I naturally turned to writing out some of my thoughts and feelings as poems. I kept those journals very carefully hidden. Had digital cameras existed back then, no doubt I would have explored that creative option, as well. I've been thinking about my first typewriter lately, and having re-discovered a big binder full of old poem juvenilia, I'm thinking about looking into the origins of some of my poetry, which for many years began in my journals. I am going to be looking more closely into this set of writings sooner rather than later, because I'm at a point in looking back through my own family history and memories where this material has risen in importance.

I began keeping a journal—as distinct from a diary, which is usually daily entries about daily personal events and thoughts about them, which I have never done—in my early college years, probably at age 19 or 20. Most of what I wrote was no doubt crappy self-exploration, the things adolescents write through in their journals, to figure out the world and themselves. But I also began the habit, from the beginning, of sketching ideas and poem drafts in my journals, which has become a lifelong practice. The poems that were worth preserving, I eventually typed into my computer(s), adding to the folders full of poem drafts over the years. That practice has continued to the present day. Nonetheless, in the turbulence of recent years, some poems have never been transcribed, or not completely.

At the moment, I find myself too easily spraining a mental ankle, if I try to talk about what I'm going through right now in words, either in journal entries or in poetry. So, I'm still taking a break from writing poems and essays—in some ways, a renewal against expectations of my practice to never go looking for a poem, but to let it find me, when it's ready. So I'm writing a lot less at the moment than I used to. At the moment, mired in some difficult life experiences, I am very aware of how limited words can be to convey what I feel, and how easily words can betray the reality by being all too easy, all too facile, all to cheap.



The first journals were spiral bound notebooks from one of the bookstores that catered to students at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Ulrich's Bookstore was on the corner of East University and South University, just across from the main campus square. I bought a lot of supplies there over the years, from notebooks to drawing pens to musical materials and textbooks. The one or two English courses that I took in my early college years were writing courses, and I used spiral notebooks from Ulrich's as my coursework notebooks. So it was not much a leap to use these same sort of spiral notebooks for my personal journals, as well.

When I was living in Surakarta, Central java, on a Fulbright, I changed to lined bound school notebooks that one could buy extremely cheaply at the school supply stores. I began to use those books there, and bought several to bring home with me, which I used for several. I liked the size of these books, as they neatly fit into a backpack or shoulder bag.

These days I use unlined artist's sketchbooks. They're larger, and better bound, and I like the unlined pages now because I draw and do calligraphy in these books now, not just write in them.

Here are two spreads from my 1993-94 journal, in one of the lined journal books brought home from Java. They show my initial writing of a poem, one of the Sutras. Specifically, Whitman Sutra (linked to in a later, more finished version).



Click on images to see larger versions

Sometimes it's interesting to look at drafts of finished poems, to see what was changed in the writing and revision processes, and what remains from the original, first draft. As I said, many if not most of my poems have begun in this way, as dated entries from one of my journals. When I type them into the computer, I tend to revise them at that point; perhaps later revisions will happen, but all on the computer, with its easy cut-and-paste editing capabilities.

In looking at the first draft of this poem, I can see where changes were made before I ever typed them into the computer. Sections were moved around, and lines and words altered. It's the beginning of a series of poems about Whitman, written over several years, as well as part of the series of Sutras still being worked on.

One reason I have been looking back through these journals, to find these poems written during my sexual awakening, is because I have been thinking Walt Whitman, his poetry and life, for almost a year now; thinking about how his poetry and homoerotic life have influenced my own, among many other gay men who happen to be artists, poets, and/or musicians. So it was interesting to find this first version of Whitman Sutra as part of this looking for the homoerotic poetry I was writing at that time. The search is ongoing, and interesting bits of my own past have been coming back to mind during this process. More on that later, as it develops.

Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings: An Appreciation

At the Goodwill retail thrift store in Delavan yesterday—a place I often find good stuff, especially good books—I found an old hardcover edition of Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld (trans. from the Swedish by Leif Sjöberg and W.H. Auden). (I also found new copies of Zen & Zen Classics, a redaction of R.H. Blyth's multi-volume work edited and with drawings by Frederick Franck; and Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.)



(I pause here to add that I think this is a beautifully designed and printed edition of this work. As a book it's been brought back into print several times, but the trade paperback editions most commonly available today do not have the solidity, heft, textured paper, or beautiful typeface used in this early hardcover edition, which I believe to be a later printing of the first edition. I photographed the cover, above, and a few pages from inside the book, below, to make this point more obvious.)

Hammaskjöld was one of those great minds of the first half of the 20th C., thinkers and writers who my parents revered. Growing up, there were always books around by Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Hammarskjöld's one famous book, published after his death. Many people of my parents' generation universally knew and admired all of these great men, as much for their social work as their scientific or artistic work. I grew up in a household where this thinking was available to me whenever I sought it out. The first time I read Markings I must have been in my teens; I remember liking it, but mostly intellectually. It was when I re-read it, probably just after college, when I was going through a personal crisis, that Markings first left a deep mark on me: I recognized in it a kindred spirit who was asking the same questions as I, and thus helped shepherd me towards some of my own answers.

Markings is an aphoristic journal, essentially a record of a man's spiritual progress. It contains almost no references to his daily life; it is an inward journal, a record of what he had learned that stayed with him as wisdom. This book remains a classic of 20th C. spiritual literature, appealing to non-religious New Agers and more conventionally religious thinkers alike. Hammarskjöld was a true ecumen. He described his book, which he had written for himself over many years, as a sort of white book concerning my negotiations with myself—and with God.

Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish national who spent his career as a public servant, first gaining prominence on the board of the directors of the Bank of Sweden. But he is best known for being a two-term Secretary-General of the United Nations, beginning in 1953. He was a Secretary-General who was widely admired and respected, and he was present for several important historical occasions and crises, which he participated in resolving. He died in 1961, in a plane crash in Africa, on his way to negotiate a cease-fire between UN and regional militia forces.

My family was in India at that time; we often received the news quite late, for example, Time magazine would get to us, sent by family, but months late. I have a young boy's memory of my parents being upset by the death of this man, when the news reached us finally

In re-reading Markings again, what strikes me now, this time, in the wake of my own life's major changes these past few years, is how very Zen-like Hammarskjöld's words can be. In this book, he is engaged with his inner "negotiations" and the outer world is barely mentioned. Death and life, and the wrestling with them to create meaning, are confronted again and again. But he also knew the still, calm center that one arrives at through meditation, through enlightenment experiences, or through contemplative prayer. He writes:

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.

One of his short almost-poems in Markings reads:

Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I—
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.

That could stand as a Zen master's death-poem, in the Japanese tradition of a final poem being dictated to one's disciple's from one's death-bed. It contains a warrior's stance, but also a spiritual master's stance. Both are true, in Hammarskjöld, both alive and awake. And in fact, he did die while engaged in his work as a spiritual warrior, journeying to engage in negotiations for peace. In the book, the line appears: In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. That is a prophet's dictum, or a warrior-saint's.

There are hints in Markings that the writer was a visionary, hints that he may have had oceanic or mystical experience. Opening to a page almost at random, I find:

Now you know. When the worries over your work loosen their grip, then this experience of light, warmth, and power. From without—a sustaining element, like air to the glider or water to the swimmer. An intellectual hesitation which demands proofs and logical demonstration prevents me from "believing"—in this, too. Prevents me from expressing and interpreting this reality in intellectual terms. Yet, through me there flashes this vision of a magnetic field in the soul, created in a timeless present by unknown multitudes, living in holy obedience, whose words and actions are a timeless prayer.

I want to respond to this again, now, and I find I can only paraphrase. Yet this passage, among others, made me feel, during that aforementioned re-read of this book during my own difficult times, connected and less alone in my experiences. I may own a bit of my enduring sanity to Dag, simply because he validated me at a time I needed validation.

I have often opined that, at the core of every spiritual tradition or world organized religion, there originally lay a mystical experience of Union with the Divine. All the rest is local interpretation: we put things into words based on what we know, and often must use analogy or metaphor, or parable, to describe the Union. This is why so much poetic wisdom sounds the same, coming from so many different sources.

Hammarskjöld, who saw the universal in the individually human many times, affirms this insight:

The ultimate experience is the same for all.



He goes on to point out where Meister Eckhart, and the Taoists and Confucianists all same similar things. Elsewhere he re-frames this question as a swipe at the tendency in us, like the Pharisees, that seems to always want to ossify our morals into rigid codes:

Jesus' "lack of moral principles." He sat at table with publicans and sinners, he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such "appeasement"? Of was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future has to be built?

I hear so many echoes in this of other wise minds of this past century: Frederick Franck; Thomas Merton; Albert Schwietzer; and many more. No matter what tradition of faith these minds were raised in, they all went past the parochial and achieved the universal, fully human. (Indeed, Franck explicitly discusses this process and goal in many of his books.)

Yet part of Hammarskjöld's complete humanity lies in his encounters, again and again, with the darker aspects of humanity; with the shadow; with pain and suffering. This is strongly reflected in Markings. A few sections pulled out of the book, again at semi-random:

That piece of pagan anthropomorphism: the belief that in order to educate us, God wishes us to suffer. How far from this is the assent to suffering when it strikes us because we have obeyed what we have seen to be God's will.



The pure, simple self at the hour of waking—and the first thing it sees—its grotesque image in the mirror of yesterday.

•

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

A mere sampling: there are many other such passages, and others even darker, full of doubt and crisis. To be fully human means to live fully in the shadow as well as the light. You cannot strip part of the self and remain whole.

How am I to find the strength to live as a free man, detached from all that was unjust in my past and all that is petty in my person, and so, daily, to forgive myself?

Life will judge me by the measure of the love I myself am capable of, and with patience according to the measure of my honesty in attempting to meet its demands, and with an equity before which the feeble explanations and excuses of self-importance carry no weight whatsoever.

Yet he does not revel in such awareness of his own limits:

Not to brood over my pettiness with masochistic self-disgust, nor to take pride in admitting it—but to recognize it as a threat to my integrity of action, the moment I let it out of my sight.

This is the self-awareness of the spiritual warrior, one who knows both his strengths and limits, and monitors his self not out of obsessive self-regard but as a captain watches her troops. In order to maintain integrity of action, to act out of integrity, in a manner internally consistent with one's ethics and moral compass.

I'll end with one last quote from Markings, one that to me represents both the author's doubts about his purpose, and my own. This is a question I often find myself asking of myself. Hammarskjöld speaks to egoless action here, to right action, in a manner that again reminds me of Zen. He also reminds me of why I write my own journals and notes, and helps me remember the best, most natural way to accomplish that writing: not for glory, but as a way of remembering, and marking, the Way. I am humbled when I read this again, and reminded to keep in check my own tendencies towards spiritual pride and literary ambition, neither of which I really want to feed. I have not chosen to take Hammarskjöld's extreme option of waiting till after my death to let anyone read my writings—although there are a few in that category—yet I do share his urge towards egolessness of expression and away from vanity.

You ask yourself if these notes are not, after all, false to the very Way they are intended to mark.

These notes?—They were signposts you began to set up after you had reached a point where you needed them, a fixed point that was on no account to be lost sight of. And so they have remained. But your life has changed, and now you reckon with possible readers, even, perhaps, hope for them. Still, perhaps it may be of interest to somebody to learn about a path about which the traveler who was committed to it did not wish to speak while he was alive. Perhaps—but only if what you write has an honesty with no trace of vanity or self-regard.

Brush-Mind Book

My sister, artist Pam Barick, makes handmade books. She finds good paper stock, interesting art-paper for covers, then creates handmade blank books, to give as gifts. I use some of these books for my handwritten journals, from time to time. I use others for gathering random thoughts in one place, notes, ideas, even recipes.



I have one particular book my sister made that I use for brush calligraphy drawing and writing. I may only write or draw in this handmade journal a few times a year. Gradually the book is becoming a collection of artistic thoughts, images, drawings, and sayings, mostly Zen-related, in the calligraphic haiga tradition, and mostly inspired by and following in the footsteps of Western Zen artist-writers Paul Reps and Frederick Franck. I reserve this handmade journal for this particular body of work. I keep the book close at hand, most of the time, even though I don't make marks in it very often. Sometimes I go back through it, to remind myself of an insight I may have had a year ago, that I have since forgotten and need to remember. Sometimes I pick it up and wonder, who made this? certainly not I! It's not an artist's sketchbook, it's not full of technically-perfect drawings, it's not not full of private journal entries. (There are one or two, that's all.) It's a handmade book full of handwritten jottings.



It's a brush-mind book, a book in which the writer is following the brush, often starting with an enso that becomes a drawing. A thought that grows into something more. A quiet book, a contemplative book.

One day it will be finished—only in the sense that there will be no more blank pages available to be filled. One that day, I will open another of my sister's handmade blank journal books (I have a stash I've set aside just for this purpose), and begin again this brush-mind work. Or, rather, continue it, in a new volume. The brush-mind book doesn't end, it doesn't conclude, it goes on.

Brush-mind happens in my other journals, too. My journals used to be written thoughts only, my inner strivings, my figuring it out by writing it out journal, my thinking-is-linking journal. Poems have often been begotten therein. Now those "regular" journals also contain brush-mind drawings, sayings, enso, and things that could easily fit into this brush-mind book. I don't try to contain it in one place, one arena. Following the brush, wherever it leads you, is what brush-mind is all about.

•



I recommend that writers, artists, and other creatives make and keep some version of a brush-mind book. If you keep a brush-mind book, there are a few things to remember.

Keeping a brush-mind book is not about "making art." It's not about craft, or perfectionism, or brilliance. It's a very small, quiet book, which you keep for your own contemplation. There is no-one to critique your brush-mind book, not even yourself. Get out of that artist's mind, and into a mind much quieter and simpler. Don't edit yourself. Be spontaneous. Let a drawing be less than wonderful, because even though it's not a perfect work of art, it contains the spirit and feeling of the moment you drew it.

Keeping a brush-mind book ought to be a sensual experience, as well as a contemplative one. If you make your own book, make it out of fine paper, exquisite cover-imagery, and good materials. Make it durable, make it lovely to hold in the hand and page through. Don't skimp on your personal satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with purchasing a journal-book to use as a brush-mind book. Just make sure that's it a beautiful book that you love to hold and contemplate. Find an interesting blank book at a bookstore or art-supply store. Maybe it will have on its cover an image from your favorite artist, or a saying by your favorite poet.

You can copy aphorisms and poems into the book, to gather together the wisdom that inspires and directs your life and work.

Use a fine pen. Go out of your way to purchase the most beautiful pen you can find. That pen or brush you always wanted, but never gave yourself permission to own before now. Writing with a fine pen or brush needs to be a sensual and pleasurable experience in its own rite. I use Japanese calligraphy brush pens for my brush-mind book, especially one particular Pentel refillable cartridge brush-pen manufactured in Japan and only available in the USA at Japanese stationary stores that import Japanese writing materials. I could buy this brush-pen online, and yet I enjoy shopping for it in person. Whenever I'm in San Francisco, I stock up. I go way out of my way to find and use these kinds of pens. I turn my pen-hunting into its own adventure, and make it into a meaningful, pleasurable experience in its own rite.

All these side-paths and by-ways turn your brush-mind book into something special, something unique, something to be treasured and kept for years. We value most that which we have worked to attain. We value most that which we have sacrificed our time and effort to obtain. Be consciously aware of this when you go looking for materials for your art. Don't be casual, and don't be callous, and take it for granted. Be mindful.

Becoming mindful is why we keep a brush-mind book. Making a brush-mind book, and drawing in it, and writing in it, is a form of mindfulness practice in itself. A form of art-as-meditation, art-as-mindfulness. You're not making great art in your brush-mind book: you're making your self.

My First Typewriter

This is my first typewriter. My parents gave it to me when I was in my teens. It's a Smith-Corona portable. I have many memories of sitting crosslegged on my bed in my room, or at my desk, typing on this typewriter. It has a hardshell metal carrying case that it locks into. When I wrote on my bed, I set the typewriter on top of its case, which made it a comfortable height for typing. I wrote most of my school papers on this typewriter, from 8th grade through the end of college. I can see spots on the rollers and shell where I accidentally painted White-Out, that most essential liquid tool of revision and rewriting before the invention of digital cut-and-paste.

My sister had an identical typewriter, and so did my mother. They were all purchased at the same time. I have two of the three typewriters in my collection.

I am fascinated by old technology. I enjoy reading about the history of technology, which is also the history of ideas and innovation. We are a technical culture, and much of our self-esteem as a culture is bound up with our developed instrumentalities; as is much of our hubris. So I have small collections. meaningful to me if no one else, of older tech. I have my father's old stethoscope. I have about a dozen antique typewriters, including iconic Royal and Underwood montrosities; but my collection is mostly focused on vintage portables. I have a small collection of navigation tools, working reproductions, commemorating my grandfather's leaving Norway at age 14 to sail in the merchant marine; I have a couple of telescopes, a sextant, several unusual compasses, etc. I have photographed many items in my collections on more than one occasion, and they appear as elements in both my visionary artwork and my commercial illustration work.



I typed up most of my first poems on this typewriter, when I started writing poems in my teens. Doesn't every writer write poems in their teens? Other than a school unit in second grade wherein we were taught haiku and cinquain as forms, I don't think I wrote poetry at all, until I entered puberty. Aren't these early poems usually forgettable? Recently, going through my old papers in storage in the basement, I found several old journals I'd forgotten about, and a sheaf of poems typed on this very typewriter. One or two poem sets are pasted into a journal volume. Others are loose, in a folder, paperclipped together. I plan to photograph these early poems, as I am doing with many of my old documents, to preserve all such papers as part of our family history, but also to explore my own personal history. I am still in that period of re-discovering and re-assessing my own life's story, in the wake of my parents' deaths.

A few days ago was the second anniversary of my father's death. At the same time, I was moved to purchase at a thrift store, for the first time in several years, another vintage typewriter, an old Underwood portable, to add to my small collection. I've also been thinking about the interconnections between my typewriter, my poetry, my calligraphy and handwriting, my design and typography work, including my original type designs, and my computers. To the mix I can now add photography, video, and multimedia aspects. I am working towards some combination of all these modes, or an exploration of what's possible when all these modes merge, overlap, or combine.

Nowadays I often type my poems directly to the screen, on my laptop, when they come forward, ready to be captured. I still handwrite poems in journals, too, but mostly when I'm away from the daily technology; for example, when I'm traveling or camping. But I remember typing to the page, composing directly on this typewriter, in my teens. That was the probable beginning of my fascination with type, and with writing directly at the typewriter, and later the laptop. I know several poets who state they can only write by hand, not to the keys; only later do they transcribe to the typewriter or computer. They say they can't write to the screen, they have to start with handwriting. Apparently I've always been able to do both. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I've never felt limited to one or the other mode of writing; the words come when they come, and the medium I write them down in is not as essential as getting them down. I still handwrite a journal, as I said, mostly when I'm traveling, when the laptop isn't handy or available. I write fast and I write legibly, another legacy of being a trained calligrapher. It all ends up in the computer now, eventually.

Among those rediscovered journal papers I also found a handwritten journal I had made on my first trip to Wyoming, as a geology student. It contains occasional entries—again, I was never a daily diarist; I can think of few things less interesting—but also many drawings and sketches. Mostly doodles, done idly during downtime, appearing as often as one is moved.

What I get from this rediscovery, now, is a renewed awareness that many of my adult artistic themes and concerns were already present in my writing and art even when I was very young. I abandoned drawing in my early twenties, thinking I was no good at it. (I was unable to cease comparing myself to more accomplished artists, and thus developed almost no self-confidence.) I look back at these old drawings and they're more interesting than I recall; but I am also remembering who I was when I did them, an explorer, an experimenter, as I am still. I gave up drawing because I thought I was no good at it, and gave all my attention to my music-making. Nonetheless, this rediscovered journals give me evidence that I was a confirmed writer and artist much earlier in life than I have recently believed. I recall starting in college the first volume of the journal that I have kept continuously ever since; but now I know I started earlier than that, I just let it drop before picking it up again more seriously later on.

I have many memories of sitting on my bed, typing on this typewriter. I wrote some of my first poetry on this typewriter. I wrote some of my first erotic poetry on it, as well. I kept a journal even in my teens, but it was a small, limited project. It was mostly for thoughts, sketches, and poem drafts. It was never a diary, a daily record of events. When I was 16, I began a long homoerotic poem that I wrote off and on for almost twenty years; I would set it aside for awhile, then come back to it; eventually it reached over 2000 words, and I transcribed it into the computer, revising it and adding to it once more. The three longest poems I have ever written have been erotic poems. I remember writing poems in a clean hand, too, when no typewriter was available. I wrote an entire chapbook of poems while on my Fulbright year in Indonesia. I copied them out in a clean hand which I mailed home to my mother periodically. I only gathered them together into a book later on.

But my mother kept everything I had ever given her; every painting, every letter, every poem, every piece of music, every drawing. She collected all my young work, and saved it for me, to be rediscovered when we were clearing out the house after my parents had died. So I have this early record now. It's juvenilia, mostly. One or two themes I can see recurring and revisited more maturely in later years; but already present in that teenage work. I'm grateful to my mother, now, for saving all this stuff: not because it's any good, as art or writing, but because it tells me that she cared, she did understand and support my art-making, and she loved me. This has been good for me to learn, now, when I need such reminders that, maybe, after all, despite everything, it has been worthwhile.

A Pilgrimage of Arts & Letters 2: Raw Realizations

woodland stream, near Nelson, NH

In my road journal entry of 4 May, this past roadtrip, I wrote out the realizations that crystallized my awareness that this was not the roadtrip I had thought it was when I firs set out. I accomplished photo and video, too, of course; but the real purpose of the journey was this pilgrimage to the places of artists and writers I've admired, and been influenced by.

This writing in my journal was brought on by my stop in Nelson, New Hampshire, to visit the home and burial place of May Sarton. Later that day, tired from the journey, tired from the bleak, cold, rainy weather, tired from the emotional load of grief about my parents, I hit a wall—or found an edge—and had a bit of a meltdown. At least I have a friend or two to call, when I hit that wall, to talk it out; to vent, to work it out, whatever it takes.

This is some of what I wrote, in the night, afterwards, once I had finally arrived in Maine, and stopped for the night. (I'm going to leave it rather more raw, unedited, and unprocessed than I might normally do here, to preserve what I was thinking in-the-moment.)

•

4 May 2009, Kennebuck, ME

I’m glad I made this stop [to visit May Sarton's gravesite in Nelson]. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the real purpose for this trip is for my own literary and artistic pilgrimage, to visit many of the places described or depicted by some writers, painters, and photographers who have great meaning for me. This was the same thing that happened to me out at the Grand Tetons last fall, and at Yosemite, when I felt strongly the presences of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston watching over me, as well as kibitzing at times. The same thing is happening now. . . .

My idea for this road trip was totally wrong. I had thought I was driving out to New England for my photo and video work, gathering images and scenes and sounds for my DVD video art business. But what I'm really doing, in fact, is that I'm on an artistic pilgrimage. I'm drawn to places where favorite artists and writers spent time. I'm going there to get a sense of their places, to learn the land-law of those places.

Purpose:

To go on artistic pilgrimage to meet my artistic idols, teachers, and mentors in their own places.

Purpose:

To learn how place affects art. To learn the land-law of art, of art-making.

To do this for myself. The real purpose of this road trip, unclear until tonight, lost amidst the drama of frustrated expectations. If I make not one more photograph, make not one more minute of video, it will not matter.

Purpose:

To visit museums, galleries, locales, and homes where artist-mentors were. To discover their muses in the land itself.

I’ve visited Sarton’s Nelson, something I never imagined I would do. It was a little strange at times, her word-images overlaid over what I was seeing; her old photographs overlaid over the images of the buildings and places I saw for myself. (Sarton and I also share gardening in common, now that I have becomes more of a gardener, or least have the ambition to be one.)

I visited the Toledo, Ohio, home of the origins of the modern art-glass movement, which gives me a sense of young Dale Chihuly’s origins, among other artists. The Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Art Museum is an homage to art glass, and is itself a beautiful modern building made out of glass, with mostly transparent walls letting in all the light.

I visited the Corning Glass Museum, in Corning, New York, not for the first time, but the first time in decades. I saw many things I remembered, and even more I didn’t. I remembered the telescope mirror glass, the lighthouse Fresnel lenses, and other optics. I think the galleries of glass gathered and grouped by historical time-period were new; or at least new to me. And there was a Chihuly there, in amongst the other modern art glass pieces in their own gallery.

I intend to visit the Maine and Pennsylvania locales of Andrew Wyeth.

I will no doubt encounter more art glass along the way. [And I did: in Columbus, Indiana, on the way home.]

If I do no more on this trip, I will have succeeded. I did not know that until tonight, and it did cause me great pain and suffering until now. Clarity sometimes comes only after the clouds have blown through and dumped on you.

If I do go into NYC after all, which after today I was not inclined to do, it will be not only to see my friends but to spend time with art, and that comes first. I don’t know if I can do it, now, logistically, after everything that’s happened. But I’m going to leave it an open question until it becomes clear.

Evidence:

At Phoenix Books, an amazing used bookstore in an old barn north of Ithaca, NY, finding some editions of poets and other writers important to me: Robinson Jeffers, Peter Matthiesen, Jung, and more.

Finding the new Cavafy collection of the Unpublished Poems. (trans. by Daniel Mendelssohn)

All this points at what I didn’t consciously know till tonight: That the real reason for this trip is an artistic/creative pilgrimage. The rest of it comes second.

Evidence:

And there are obvious affinities between some of them. The book I picked up in Ithaca, on three generations of Wyeth artists, describing how Andrew was so often misunderstood as a pastoralist realist when in fact he is much more abstract, much more modern, much more bleak. The Thomas Hoving essay in the book summarizes both how he has been so often misunderstood, and provides a corrective explanation.

Put that side by side with The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, gathered from Phoenix Books, who in his forward writes of similar bleakness and harshness in both the land and the people who work it. The opening lines of Boats In A Fog, for example:

Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.

In his Foreward, the poet writes of the difference between prose, which can be ephemeral and topical of the moment, and poetry, which needs to be durable and eternal, so that readers two thousand years distant can still recognize their lands and lives in the poems. This is why Homer still matters.

So, affinities. Patterns. Identities. Mergings. Muses. Gatherings-in of place and time to make the great art and writing of our times.

Lake George, NY

I only got as far as the town of Lake George on this day of the roadtrip. I left Ithaca late, after lingering in the morning at Treman SP, making photos of the trillium and other wildflowers. Then I lingered further at a Border's on the north end of town, where I found a book on three generations of Wyeth painters; I plan to stop in at Chadds Ford, PA, at the Brandywine Museum, which is a central node of Andrew Wyeth's heritage. Then I stopped at Phoenix Used & Rare Books; not only was this an amazing used book store, but I found three or four hard-to-find literary treasures, and a hardcover edition of a Jung volume that helps complete my set of the Collected Works. After that, I headed across New York and into the Adirondacks. I stopped several times in the Adirondacks to make photographs, and shoot video footage. Late in the day, I stopped at the Sacandaga River for awhile. Then, a bit later, I crossed the upstate Hudson River, very beautiful in its scenic upstream settings.



I arrived at Lake George an hour before sunset, tired of driving and ready to stop for the day. After finding a fine hotel amongst this resort vacation town's multitude, many of which were not yet open for the season, I wandered down the main street to eat a delicious meal at a new Indian restaurant in town.



I had a pleasant chat with the owners, who had moved upstate a year ago from Queens, having visited and fallen in love with Lake George. This is probably the only Indian restaurant on this long route between New York City and Montreal. Then I went back to my hotel for a restful night. I used the hotel pool and spa to unwind, soaking in the hot-tub till it felt like all the kinks in my back had loosened, then doing laps in the pool for awhile.



In the morning, I lingered on the hotel's balcony, drinking my orange juice and doing some writing.. I had a room on the second floor, with its own sitting area with table and chairs. I good have lingered all day, to be honest. I felt at peace in the morning light, having slept well after a long previous day's drive.



The verandah runs the entire length of the hotel, and in the morning sunlight it was pleasant to enjoy sitting out as though one had the entire resort to oneself for the day.


White on white

Here's a still-life arrangement of discarded towels in my hotel bathroom, a chance arrangement that seemed formally perfect, and caught my attention.



I sat on the verandah for awhile, copying into my road journal the haiku and other momentary poems I'd written over the past couple of days. These were mostly written on scraps, some even written while driving, notepad held on knee under the wheel, and gathered together here to preserve them in one place. I'm a pretty good driver, and every so often, if it's an open road, not too much traffic, and not a lot of curves, I can chicken-scratch something done before I lose the moment, lose the idea; then transcribe it later into the journal, like this.



•

This all feeds into the arts & literature pilgrimage that this roadtrip has become. This day in early May, with few of the hotels open yet, with the weather still dominated by New England spring rains, I started to realize finally that my real purpose on this roadtrip was to do a pilgrimage to many of the places that were home to writers and artists whose work I have loved and respected. This became the main theme of this roadtrip, eventually. I made many good photographs nonetheless, and got enough good video, waterfall video in particular, to make a complete DVD of just waterfalls. A lot of this material will feed into an eventual Spring DVD from a planned Four Seasons series.


Stieglitz and O'Keeffe at Lake George

Of course, when in Lake George it's impossible not to think of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. They were summering and making their art here together a century ago, as attested by many of the photographs in the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive at the Bienecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. A number of these special collections have been digitized and are available online. (I once visited the Bienecke in person some years ago, and was very impressed with the layout of the library, and its method of making even some its rarest books visible to ordinary passersby.)


lakeshore view from the Stieglitz cottage


the Stieglitz "cottage," more of a mansion really

The Stieglitz mansion at Lake George was a family property. It was not long after Stieglitz first met O'Keeffe that he invited her to summer with him at the "cottage."


Stieglitz writing on the cottage verandah


O'Keeffe at Lake George, photographed by Stieglitz

O'Keeffe made some of her earliest abstract landscapes here in the Adirondacks, years before her first trip and eventual move to New Mexico. O'Keeffe was always circling around abstraction, aware of pure form even in her most figurative work. One thing I find in O'Keeffe that I recognize in my awareness of form is a sensitivity to circular and spiral forms.

Something Iconic

an earlier road journal

I didn't have much chance to write or post much when on the road. I rarely do, when on a road trip. Frankly, this time out it was rough going at times. Lots of incredibly tough things happened, that really threw me for a loop; and then there were moments so glorious and fulfilling they can barely fit into words. Luminosity is a word that can barely contain what it felt like at times: to be filled with light.

So I'll be doing what I usually do after a road trip, which is going through my journal entries and photos from the trip, sorting through to find what good things, and post them over the next week or three. That's the way it works, usually. It's a process of artistic, spiritual, and personal integration.

There were a few events that leave me feeling completely changed, and challenged to continue to work to become a better human being. Art is my way. It is not casual, nor is it a hobby. It is profoundly, deeply, powerfully life-changing, for me. I will pursue this to the end. I don't expect to ever give it up, but rather to be making some kind of art the moment I die. It is not a hobby, it is not casual: it is the very stuff of life, of existence.



So here I am, making an icon: an image of a previous journal, a road journal if life is the road, which it is. Interpreted for myself as an icon of travel writing, or writing about life, containing poetry, thought, drawings, and even a few pressed leaves from time to time. Lots of clutter in the journals. Sorting through the clutter is the process of refinement and reintegration. It doesn't matter what you discover, what matters is that you do seek to discover: that you set out to discover. What I write has often been nothing more than the reports of what I've experienced. if the writing is uniquely my own, which it might someday become, it's because what I've experienced has been filtered through my personal way of speaking, of putting language together, of throwing paint at the wall. Idiosyncratic, iconic, inexpressible at times; a fingerprint unique, even as everyone has the same kind of fingerprints and fingers. What we have in common, what links us all into one, that is the Essentially Human, which I am thinking about today, the morning after my return, as I do my chores of return, the unpacking, touring the gardens left neglected by the traveler, the rest, the time spent in silence, in memory, in watching the light change, sometimes wishing one was still in motion, still traveling, even now at rest, still moving, while the daystar spins over to dusk and the evening deepens, darkening the colors of the flowers I left behind and am now becoming reacquainted with.

Road Work

from the Road Journal

I'm in Maine at the moment, on a photography/videography road trip. I've met several people in Maine who came from elsewhere on a visit, and stayed. Or left and came back. It is indeed very beautiful here on the northern Atlantic coast. It's the same latitude as northern Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so at times the land looks very familiar to my eye: right down to the dominant tree and other plant species. You're in "The North" here. But there's also the ocean.

I've been doing a lot of driving. Some days it seems like too much. Driving in New England does not impress me, for several reasons: all the roads here are twisty and low-speed, so even though the distance on the map doesn't look like much, you don't get very far some days. Out in Wyoming or Nevada, I've driven for nine hours, example, and gone the length of those states, where the roads and long and straight and open, and where the speed limits are higher than in New England. A couple of days ago, in Vermont and New Hampshire, I drove all day and barely got 200 miles. It can get frustrating to someone more used to open roads than windy river-valley-following trails.

Another problem is that every little town on the two-lane highways seems to regard having a stoplight as a status symbol. The problem is, they are not run by computers using traffic sensors, so you can sit at a red light, where there's zero cross-traffic, and no else around at all, for up to three minutes for no reason.

Final reason that I'm going to mention here. Call me a Midwesterner, I won't complain. But I have yet to observe that the feeling that many New Englanders seem to carry, that they are the center and circumference of the Known Universe, is based in anything but illusory self-satisfaction. Granted, any locale can contain a certain smugness. You expect this sense of self-focus from New York City: but to also get it from people who live in remote upstate New York as well? Well. If it's earned, I haven't seen how as yet.


from the Road Journal

I'm on the road, making new images. I'm getting some good work done, yet it's been raining and cold this entire trip, with only about a day and a half of sunshine logged in over a week of travel. I intended to camp out in state parks all the way; but the weather has been so bad, I've only been able to camp out twice so far. Perhaps on the return leg of the trip, when things further south become more summerlike than late-winterlike.

But I'm also on the road for my own reasons, which are more important. These reasons didn't even become clear to me until I'd already set out. Specifically, I am on a sort of pilgrimage to visit the home-places and muse-places of many artists and writers I admire. I've visited May Sarton's home in Nelson, New Hampshire. I plan to look in Frederick Franck's place Pacem In Terris; also, Andrew Wyeth's Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania; Robert Frost's Vermont; and perhaps some others. This plan and purpose only came clear to me once I was already here; but now it's the trip's main theme. I've been writing up thoughts about this as I go, which I will eventually post as essays with photos. Right now, though, I'm gathering still, not yet digesting and writing-about. Later for that.


the artist at work, Watkin's Glen State Park, NY

I'll be traveling for another week or so. Then I'll be back home, and start the sorting process, once I recover from the long drives. Meanwhile, I post here a few tidbits, a few random images and haiku and other thoughts, and perhaps one or two soundscapes as they occur.

We drive on. We can't go on. We go on.

Visionary Artwork 2

Journal Pages

Notes working towards a visionary artwork that can be described, articulated, but not contained. Notes jotted down at white heat, to be expanded later, because you really need to run out the door right now but don't want to lose the thought. Notes that might be presented later as notebook verbatim, perhaps as a poetic journal. (A genre that strongly appeals to me, which I practice by default if not always by conscious intent, with my Road Journal.) Also an artistic journal. A photographer's daybooks; an artist's pages. A logbook of transformations.


Calligraphy of the Body

Many pieces of visionary artwork began from photographs of Mystery: often a little blurry, motion-blur or depth of field, as photographs of Mystery ought to be. Motion blur or camera shake seem appropriate places to start, as Spirit is always in motion, always moving, breathing, dancing. Many names for the Divine are verbs, not nouns: Living is dancing. Or Spirit That Moves In All Things. Or The Breath of God moved across the waters. Or the loom of time is Indra's breath.

It's good to start with something a little mysterious in itself. Something that doesn't give you a quick thumbnail answer or narrative. Something that stops you long enough to be contemplated. It's good when it's a little inexplicable, a little hard to capture. (And harder to capture in words than in images.) Catch it by one wing, but don't try to hold it, don't try to pin it down.


water birds 2

Lines from a poem merged into artwork. I don't remember now if the lines came first, or the image was there, and inspired the lines.

the night goes walking like a bird,
bobbing its head around every flame,
filling the spaces in between with dark, shiny feathers

A single image, a little spare when just words. Add some evocative context: imagery, blur, expressive typography, and something greater than the sum of its parts just might emerge.

One weakness I feel most writers have is that they don't think about presentation: the way things look on the page, the proper use of spacing and placement, the best choice of typeface. In other words, design elements. I've been a graphic designer, a book designer, a layout artist, a printer, and I've designed original typefaces. That puts me in very small minority of writers, most of whom in my experience are conscious of none of these disciplines. I know of few poets who are even aware of design, and fewer among those who have set their hand to it.

There are few poetry presses, even, who have done much with book design or illustration; those that have, such as Copper Canyon Press, stand out from the pack. In their early years, they were a small-budget press in which the publisher often handset the type for a book; I have several of Copper Canyon's old first editions, and they are sensual experiences in themselves. Paper, ink, and typeface choices all made carefully, as complementary aspects of the process of publishing. There was a fondness for Deepdene type in those early editions; it's a strong, classic typeface, very good for poetry setting, not well known now or often used currently. This is the sort of thing poets ought to think about, and rarely do. Ugly presentation does your words no good service.



I've done a lot of commissioned cover artwork and illustration for books, magazines, and music albums, and interestingly a lot of that commissioned work falls into the category of visionary artwork. Some have been pieces that were requested by the artist because they had seen an existing piece of visionary art, which they wanted a version of for their publication; this CD cover was one of those instances. (We're getting into nuts & bolts of the business here, and demystifying the artistic process, I know, but bear with me.) When you're an aspiring visionary artist, you might still need to be a working commercial artist, and this project paid a month's rent at the time. Sometimes I also get to do the typography: I often try to convince the client to let me do the typography, as part of the art itself, as this opens doors into a greater potential to be able to integrate art, concept, and type. Just as in a vision-poem piece, the words become part of the artwork itself.


Moons

Follow the blur. Spirit moves too fast for the naked eye to follow. The golden statue at the center of the ring of light, seemingly motionless, is flickering: not moving, or moving so fast, and returning, and moving, that it's too fast to catch, except by the flicker, the blur. The gold streak across the redblue eye of sunset.

The Ideology of Critique 5: Categorical Division

Continuing along the path of my increasing lack of interest in attempts to categorically separate "poetry" and "prose," I find myself writing out small pieces of "creative writing" the way they seem to want to come out. Sometimes lineated and enjambed, sometimes not. Sometimes going back and forth. Following the breath, following the brush, following the pen, or those quiet inner voices. This blurring of boundaries is nothing new. Haibun is a form I've worked in long enough that it feels natural now, a way of breathing the work rather than imposing my intentions on it; haibun practice was one root of this lack of division. (For those not yet clued in, haibun is a Japanese poetic form in which densely-poetic prose sections alternate with haiku; prose and poetry are mixed; it's sometimes very similar to Western poetry's prose-poems, but is in fact an older form.)

I've gone back this past month to handwriting thoughts in journal books, those same blank-paged books I use for sketching, drawing, journaling when I have no typewritten access to tools, doing little calligraphic haiga, or enso. It's all one book with many kinds of art and writing in it, sharing space, going back and forth. If you were to open any volume of the handwritten journal I've kept for the last almost-thirty years, you'd see similar blurs. Most of my poetry used to start in the journals, first drafts at least, and only later be transcribed into the computer. I went back to handwriting partly because my laptop's hard-drive died a month ago, and the restoration has been difficult, leaving me with the almost-certain loss of a month's worth of work. (Don't lecture me about backing your data up: I've given the lecture enough times, I know it's every trope and judgment. The problem is, sometimes you begin to trust too much.) So handwriting has paradoxically come to seem more permanent than print, of late.

Perhaps you can see why the boundaries between prose and poetry blur, when other boundaries, such as those between writing and art, also blur. My journal has always moved between many artforms with no need to separate them. The truth is, I'm not interested in keeping things separated; I suppose I never was, really, but I tried to have maintain clear divisions for many years, mostly because other artists seemed to think one is supposed to. I bought into the ideology of categorical division, knowing no better; as a young artist very few of my teachers broke away from the party line. Now I think it's all illusion, those divisions all a waste of time. They might exist, or they might not; the point is not to waste a lot of time on them, but to get back to writing. Do the work, sort it out later. Or don't bother.

Academic scholasticism, at its philosophically reductionist worst, tends to get itself tied into knots over how many angels can dance on the head of pin. Is this really a poem? Is this prose poetic prose or no-style prose. Academic poetry and criticism tend to get similarly lost in the details, and lose oversight. Does it matter how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? and what kind of pin? Nail the world to the coffin of ideas; it won't matter to the world.

So what do I call this writing, this new writing I seem to find myself doing. Which again is changing, going in directions I never imagined or predicted. I do not feel at all in control of this. I feel like it's a struggle just to get the words to stop dancing long enough to find an image that lingers. Trying to get a poem down, lately, feels like trying to nail mist to wood: killing living butterflies by pinning them, in flight, to the page. They keep trying to get away. Getting to the end of a line is taking a lot longer than it used to, as I have to chase and follow, and nothing falls easily to the paper.

Does it need a name, an -ism? Aren't we always, in the grand tradition of the avant-garde, supposed to publish A Manifesto? Aren't we supposed to announce what we're doing? Tell the whole world we've invented the newest, shiniest toaster? Aren't we supposed to pretend we know what we're doing, as if it was all planned, and we weren't stumbling around by accident and chance and the luck, making it up as we go? As if we had a big overall plan?

No. Manifestoes only make sense when they're descriptive of what people are already doing, rather than what they intend to do. Most art made by fiat, by plan, by theoretical intention, is dry as dust at best, and excruciatingly horrid at worst. Art that is too well planned tends to fail as art. It might be a good etude, an interesting example of manifesto art, or political art, or otherwise "meaningful" art. But as art, on the merits of art, it often can't stand on its own two feet. This is not exactly a news flash, of course. Too many artistic "movements," too many -isms, suffer from manifestoitis. This has only gotten worse as a professional poetry class has ensconced itself in academia, and come to dominate the discourse. There are progressive voices within this chorus, but they are largely outshouted by those who find that once they have power over other's minds, they like it and want to keep it, and tend to become conservative in both opinion and relationship. Don't be fooled: even most of the current self-proclaimed post-avant-garde (All Avant Garde All The Time! Just Find Us a Straw-Man To Rebel Against!) are intellectually conservative, no matter what their art looks like. You won't see a lot of fresh innovation coming from those directions; although you will see a lot of retreaded ideas from previous avant-garde -isms.

Call these newest poem-like substances that fall out of my notebooks something, not as an -ism, but just as a convenient folder label in which to container them. Call them, for no better reason than that I need a folder to gather things in, Field Notes. Field Notes is a good name for something open-ended, provisional, notational, and, as far as it can be, effable. Random bits of conversation, artwork, and observation falling out from the between the loose pages of an explorer's notebook. Call them scattered leaflets and trash strewn in wake of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery (two hundred years ago in time, right now in spirit). Corpses falling off the back of the corpse-wagon. Leaves in the wind.

I'm discovering that I don't know when one of these pieces is done. It doesn't end on its own. It just stops. I'm not a poet who believes you can force an ending; it has to emerge out of the material, it can't be contrived. When you paste an ending on a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing, the paint colors never match, you can always tell it's an add-on. The parallels between neo-formalism in poetry and neo-conservatism in politics are obvious: both would like to stuff certain cats back into certain bags. But everyone knows how impossible it is to herd cats. Literary criticism that seeks to restore some essentialist value-set, or return to some set of values once held and know evolved beyond, is reactionary. There's nothing wrong with being conservative in one's opinions; but if you proclaim your New Dogma from the highest hills and don't convince anyone of your rightness, don't complain about it. Reserve judgment.

I'm stumbling around here trying to articulate three things about whatever it is I'm writing right now: I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if it's any good. Trying to figure out if it's any good is a lot less important than continuing to do it.

So I'm going to just keep making the stuff. After that, we'll see. I will continue to contemplate it: to contemplate the act of Making, as well as what has been made, or is being made; and not only by my own small self.

And I'm not going to label it for you. You can do that for yourself. If you think it's poetry, or a prose-poem, or a bit of poetic prose, or something else, bully for you.

I've given up all notions of participation in the various literary-critical forums I once participated in: they have, without exception, proven themselves to be more about the personalities than about the writing. Life's too short to want to wade into other peoples' various kinds of drama. I left those communities because they were never more than virtual, or pseudo. I read around, I scan a lot of material, trying to find some critic with generally new and revealing ideas about literature, and I find a lot of parrots. I find a lot of very well-read, very articulate conservatives whose tastes in fiction, for example, are locked into linear narrative, into polished grammatical prose, and who post lists of Great Books that they love—meaning, that they think everyone else should love them, too, or at least they should read them.

"Should" is a very coercive word. It's a word that says "I know better than you, so you had better listen to my advice." It's an arrogant word. It's a word that claims authority. It's not that authority is bad, it's that claims to it must remain provisional lest they inflate themselves into absurdity.

But there's nothing you can say to impermeable arrogance, the variety that knows best, and knows best for you. Some critics try to demure, saying, well, this is only my taste, my opinion, judge for yourself. But that's usually disingenuous; there remains a whiff of sulfurous judgment in the air. You know they still think you ought to agree with them.

I have met folk who genuinely didn't want to impose their views on others. They do exist. They are often genuinely humble people—not falsely humble, and not humiliated. They tend to be self-contained while being open to experience. They keep their centers even as they are open to acting in the world. They state their truth, but they don't impose: they say what they mean to say, and let go of the outcome. Which was always up to others, anyway. They are truthful speakers.

There are a very few critics who fit this mold. Some of them are wise as well as educated and smart. They often don't stand out from the pack, and become famous. That's because there isn't an axe to grind, an ideology to be imposed, or a set of moral values driving their critical opinions. They are open to whatever they see. They report back from the frontiers of truth.

And I've noticed that for the most part they don't try to set fences around art, or break it up into categories, or create false critical divisions merely for the sake of egoistic rhetorical posturing. "Is it a poem?" becomes a less important question than "Is it a good bit of writing?" If they can do it, so can the rest of us. So Mote It Be.