Sustenance

“The poem comes in the form of a blessing—‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.” —Stanley Kunitz

farewells

Saturday night was a bitter-sweet evening of reminiscences and good wishes. Thanks for hosting it Chad.

Love,
rocelyn

Stamatis

Tell Me a Story
by Robert Penn Warren

[ A ]
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.
I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.
I did not know what was happening in my heart.
It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.
The sound was passing northward.

[ B ]
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.

Jettisonning ol' bags

Not sadness but relief...finally to stop his wagging tongue of negativity...

I have been warned in my first year of grad school to cut ties with people in love with their negativity, even long-standing friends who don't realize their constant bitterness and unhappiness about the state of the world, who find the injustice, speak well of it, but does nothing to change it, if only to further justify their victimization by the harsh system. Deep inside, there is self-aggrandisement in this constant bickering, as if to say, look I am better than this and therefore I am not going to play--this goes in all areas: work, art, love, friendships...the list is long, as variegated as life itself. We all go through our moments of disillusionment, but at some point, you pick up and attempt to salvage remnants of optimism that once allowed you to create beauty in a world constantly riddled by unkindness. This is the cycle of recovery; along the way, you hope friends, negative or not, will stick by you, accepting only that for better or worse, you are nothing but an evolving human-being. These people are few and far between. For one, the end of line has been reached.

Fact is, the world is as treacherous or as kind as we wish to see it. A common vision of it links us to the persons we hold close. The question is, what happens when one or the other ventures far from the common ground and lands at a different vantage point? Description is a piss-poor second to experience. We connect mostly based on the common path we tread and our same knowledge stops the other from needing to finish a sentence. A nod suffices and in that we find relief. Now, once we no longer feel the pain or elation of our friends, something vital has broken. This nod comes rarer in the conversations and in its place slithers judgment. You cannot really know what something is like until you have had it happen to you. Simple? Yet true. This is the rupture that a kind word would have bridged.

The trouble is, when the other fails to understand, he becomes excluded in the other person's experience. "Oh, wait, she's talking, I don't understand it, so, it's no longer about us...what about ME! Don't I have a say in this?"

ANSWER: NO! Apparently not! Point is, it isn't about the listener anymore, so he cuts off and feels offended at his lack of voice, at his inability to be heard through the other's pain. So, the inexperienced gets left in the peanut gallery and has no other role to play but that of the abstract critic, staking a claim, feeling entitled to spew out his opinions, which are mostly uninvited, while justifying this transgression as an act of friendship, a way, as it were, to save his friend from herself. Truth is, this unsolicited "advice-giving" is never for the sake of the other; rather it serves as a self-protective act, the most pernicious form of egotism. This is the luxury of those who yell from the gallery...most of the time you can detect the bitterness and ignorance. Most of the time, they are the ones who know the least about the experience they choose to plunder with comments. It speaks volumes when people come to such an impasse. As all things cycle in and out, so do people.

I've seen it over the years, a certain toxicity in this bag.

Bloggunnery

...I admire poets...one, in particular.

In my not so distant past, I knew of one who possessed the amateur artistry of a wordsmith, adept at maneuvering through the nuances of words. In my days of high impressionability, I loved him most for his words--not his looks, not his smile, but a shadow of his character through my perception of his poetry-- what I considered his delicate humanity in seeing the nature of people and the universe: I thought that this was first step to divinity, exercising our ability to grasp the abstract which are oftentimes unspeakable. Now upon closer inspection, after emerging out of such maddening experiences and having played my cards full out among strangers, expending my energy living and loving--naively, I must say--all the while shelving my artistic goals, taking a hiatus from theater in order to 'live' and find out other aspects of life I had neglected in pursuit of the rigor of this discipline, I have arrived at considering how differently we process the act of loving: there are those who feel it, truly feel it deep in their bones, who welcome the wonderous exhilaration and chaos of intimacy--all the confused, crazed and humbling stages of falling in love under the most surprising and imperfect circumstances versus those who speculate and wish to dive in. My poet, alas, is of the latter sort. I realize now how comforting words are to him, what a sanctuary these pages are to one who wish so passionately to feel passionately...O wondrous words that aim at a diluted substitution: intoxicating upon pronouncement you remain as insubstantial as the air whereupon you float. I see now that for the ignorant, words WILL taste sweetest for it references a territory beyond the pale of one's immediate comprehension--that place of power and utter helplessness.