So here I am. In my dreams.
What would I do without writing? Maybe I’d knit, or paint. Maybe, if my back were better, I’d cross-country ski. Maybe I’d cook. Well, I can rule that one out right away. I can do it, I’m pretty good at it, but I’m tired of cooking. Too many years of putting dinner on the table at 6. One white thing, one green thing, one brown thing, my kids would say.
I’m getting too old to ski. I loved the brief time after we moved north that I did ski. I was never very good, but if the track were groomed, I did okay. It’s exciting. Knitting? I tried once but got tired of it fast. Painting? I would choose that as second, although I’ve had no formal training. I got an A in college in my Fine Arts painting class, but I’d need to work hard at it.
All art is an elaboration on what we experience, right? It’s like taking photos through our own eyes, picking up the reverberations from our inner selves. It adds our irreplaceable beings to the outer formations, extending ourselves outward. You could say it celebrates what we are. The balance of ego and ego-lessness it takes to do this is delicate.
We writers are lucky to have work to do that never ends. Look how old I am! I keep living, keep adding midrash to the text of my life. It slips around the edges and says more sometimes than the original. Like this Wobbly. A web-log like a captain’s ship log: here’s where I went, what I did, what I thought.
Not just that, but infused with my own vibrating life well as your active reception.
Adrianne Rich: “We go to poetry because we believe it has something to do with us. We also go to poetry to receive the experience of the not me, enter a field of vision we could not otherwise apprehend.”
Poetry is the lowest tech there is. No musical notes, no instrument but words. Words that have transformed over the ages, taken on different connotations, sometimes even changed direction. My choice of when and how to place them on the page is how I give them tone. Because they are low-tech, they are very little influenced by the spectacles of power.
Which means that poetry is essentially an amateur art, in the sense that anyone can do it and anyone can read it. That’s how it should be. Non-professional, with an element of play. We want to entertain our friends. Really. This is where it starts. I love the poets who put themselves out there, critics bedamned. But then mostly they decide to think again, put on a different dress, try a little makeup. That doesn’t make them professional. It makes them want to do a better job of getting at the heart of things, and of entertaining their friends.
Obviously I’m not sitting in the chair. But you can put me here, if you’d like.
I’m sitting here in my orange chair, snow falling outside. There’s a large mourning dove hogging the sunflower seeds on the feeder. Think of the reverberations of that sentence: some kind of mourning going on in the background, and the hogging that brings up still another picture in the mind. And me, nestled here in orange. The simplest words can expand the world all over the place. I’ve had/am having such a good time expanding it as far as I can.