a first stab is further wounding
Welcome to w e r d u m, my first venture into the blog. Inspired by my friends young blogs and Ron Silliman's comparatively ancient one. I'm wading in. This seemed like such a wonderful idea and a natural outgrowth of my work until I actually started typing. Now it feels rough and uncertain, not an unfamiliar place to begin (first lines of the Inferno, anyone?).
w e r d u m f i e l d is a site I will return to - the vow being once a day, M-F, to venture my thoughts on topics of the hour, as they fleet foot it by. I'm looking for - primarily - an outlet to practice the prose sentence as it manifests in the essay, essay used here loosely, in the old French sense of essai, a trail. So a venturing into issues and subjects to reclaim more land for my writing. As a poet, I can at times keenly feel the limits of my rhetorical range, and I have long wanted to add "poet & essayist" but I can't find any essays I've developed farther than a rough draft rant buried in the hard drive.
I'm also looking for an investigations of writing, poetics, and consciousness. This is not a blog chalking up the details of my private life, but it very much aims to be a blog which incorporates the full panoply of my personal experience. I realize that the distinction between private and personal is just that - an often quickly made and roughly run fence - but what I am implying is that I hope this site will be rewarding even if you have never met me face to face. So I am aiming to set up a public space with this blog, a public space that is not itself selling anything - though if you would like to buy a book or two of my press subday, or even a book or twelve of my own steely dan, i think we can hammer out an arrangement.
Much, most, and perhaps all of this work will be done - at least for now - on my computer here at work, during odd or even lengthy stretches of calm. So that is another constraint, as long as we're talking methods and aims here:
How strange to "begin." Strange and artificial - that is to say man-made - as this work is a continuation, in a new space, of an age-old practice and often schizological distraction/obsession of mine, largely around the intertwined Qs: what is a poem, what exactly happens (and can happen) when reading/writing, and who/how am i? I wobble endlessly - both as an open participant and overwhelmed neurotic - in my continual investigations of these koan questions. And through this, they have become increasingly and wonderfully alive and full of power to me, dynamic, fragile, massive bodies within which to explore and dwell. So the rough map of this blog's territory is always already drawn, and yet the process is continual, the drawing itself is what this site will bear witness to, not some final and definite map by which to pilot down waterways or across interstate. Hopefully, US-Mexico borders will be kept to a healthy minimum here, with their entrenched, static positions requiring ever-further defenses, at ever-higher costs (to all parties). Even our former Hollywood action hero Governor has stumbled across this minefield with his comments praising - unironically - the "Militiamen" (or vigilantes, as you like it) who have been abetting the official border patrols in their "police actions" against the illegals who seek to work the minimum wage jobs the rest of us would rather die than perform.
If I have any luck, this blog, like SIlliman's will spawn its own barking comment box full of pesky dogs. Avast, fuckers!
I was going to talk about the Gang of Four lyrics cycling endlessly through my head after Monday nite's mind-blowing show ("concert" : when - a teen - I'd say "show" my Midwestern mother always used to reply: "but you didn't go to see a movie"). But, instead, if you haven't paid much or any attention to Gang of Four, check out an excellent essay by Greil Marcus on the Gof4 here (its the second essay) and take it from there. No one else quite brings (round) ass and (sharp) head together so cathartically. Certainly not the Chili Peppers.
So I am writing this to further the cause of an aware poetics, of a close attention to language, and a continual wrestling w/ the questions that animate my mind (and career). I think I might even be writing this to be a better citizen, to sort through the madness of our times, our meth-head culture, our puppeteer politics, our byzantine social rituals of commodified alienation and passivity (I want to talk to strangers on the bus) and enact a democratic space where I and the we around me share the work of making our world, and the equally essential work of listening to and witnessing the world already-being-made (and this will all be done fast, on the fly, w/ duct tape and a residual paranoia that my boss is coming).
I have never heard it more succinctly put than in the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao te Ching: Know the yang, but stick to the yin. w e r d u m f i e l d will be a site to explore this dynamic, to locate a workable basis for a discriminating poethics. And hopefully to discover a source of humor too, amid all this contemplation: sticky, light, all over our fingers. Tasting neither of chicken nor chocolate. And, as Joanne Kyger puts it, avoiding the success/failure game.
The change will do you good.
w e r d u m f i e l d is a site I will return to - the vow being once a day, M-F, to venture my thoughts on topics of the hour, as they fleet foot it by. I'm looking for - primarily - an outlet to practice the prose sentence as it manifests in the essay, essay used here loosely, in the old French sense of essai, a trail. So a venturing into issues and subjects to reclaim more land for my writing. As a poet, I can at times keenly feel the limits of my rhetorical range, and I have long wanted to add "poet & essayist" but I can't find any essays I've developed farther than a rough draft rant buried in the hard drive.
I'm also looking for an investigations of writing, poetics, and consciousness. This is not a blog chalking up the details of my private life, but it very much aims to be a blog which incorporates the full panoply of my personal experience. I realize that the distinction between private and personal is just that - an often quickly made and roughly run fence - but what I am implying is that I hope this site will be rewarding even if you have never met me face to face. So I am aiming to set up a public space with this blog, a public space that is not itself selling anything - though if you would like to buy a book or two of my press subday, or even a book or twelve of my own steely dan, i think we can hammer out an arrangement.
Much, most, and perhaps all of this work will be done - at least for now - on my computer here at work, during odd or even lengthy stretches of calm. So that is another constraint, as long as we're talking methods and aims here:
-the prose sentence
-at work
-investigating poetics
How strange to "begin." Strange and artificial - that is to say man-made - as this work is a continuation, in a new space, of an age-old practice and often schizological distraction/obsession of mine, largely around the intertwined Qs: what is a poem, what exactly happens (and can happen) when reading/writing, and who/how am i? I wobble endlessly - both as an open participant and overwhelmed neurotic - in my continual investigations of these koan questions. And through this, they have become increasingly and wonderfully alive and full of power to me, dynamic, fragile, massive bodies within which to explore and dwell. So the rough map of this blog's territory is always already drawn, and yet the process is continual, the drawing itself is what this site will bear witness to, not some final and definite map by which to pilot down waterways or across interstate. Hopefully, US-Mexico borders will be kept to a healthy minimum here, with their entrenched, static positions requiring ever-further defenses, at ever-higher costs (to all parties). Even our former Hollywood action hero Governor has stumbled across this minefield with his comments praising - unironically - the "Militiamen" (or vigilantes, as you like it) who have been abetting the official border patrols in their "police actions" against the illegals who seek to work the minimum wage jobs the rest of us would rather die than perform.
If I have any luck, this blog, like SIlliman's will spawn its own barking comment box full of pesky dogs. Avast, fuckers!
I was going to talk about the Gang of Four lyrics cycling endlessly through my head after Monday nite's mind-blowing show ("concert" : when - a teen - I'd say "show" my Midwestern mother always used to reply: "but you didn't go to see a movie"). But, instead, if you haven't paid much or any attention to Gang of Four, check out an excellent essay by Greil Marcus on the Gof4 here (its the second essay) and take it from there. No one else quite brings (round) ass and (sharp) head together so cathartically. Certainly not the Chili Peppers.
So I am writing this to further the cause of an aware poetics, of a close attention to language, and a continual wrestling w/ the questions that animate my mind (and career). I think I might even be writing this to be a better citizen, to sort through the madness of our times, our meth-head culture, our puppeteer politics, our byzantine social rituals of commodified alienation and passivity (I want to talk to strangers on the bus) and enact a democratic space where I and the we around me share the work of making our world, and the equally essential work of listening to and witnessing the world already-being-made (and this will all be done fast, on the fly, w/ duct tape and a residual paranoia that my boss is coming).
I have never heard it more succinctly put than in the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao te Ching: Know the yang, but stick to the yin. w e r d u m f i e l d will be a site to explore this dynamic, to locate a workable basis for a discriminating poethics. And hopefully to discover a source of humor too, amid all this contemplation: sticky, light, all over our fingers. Tasting neither of chicken nor chocolate. And, as Joanne Kyger puts it, avoiding the success/failure game.
The change will do you good.
posted by Kyle at 4:11 PM
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