Rilke

1) You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid doing right now. No one can advise or help you--no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?


2) Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.


3) If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the Creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.


4) But let me make this request right away: Read as little as possible of literary criticism--such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened & empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.





10/30/08 - Letters to a Young Poet (which is, as is a rarity in the literary world, a collection of exactly what it says) is the most encouraging thing I've read in years.

time

blocks, they build
cubist machines like houses and sidewalks:
Geometry-invoking dreams
cities built of circles rectangles triangles.
angular momentum moves these weighty blocks; i dance in blocks too.
this rectangular bus ride followed by
a triangle time of tasks in the city;
another rectangle ride and i plunge into the vast square
--so many office hours.
you know for every eight hours of work are sixteen you don't,
but the spaces between do not loom so much. cities too:
more space downtown than buildings--but what we see are blocks.

scraps, i find them
everywhere writing upon their destitute backs
going sideways against the printed words: i try
writing small--concentrate my concentration.
stealing rough-edged bits of paper to record rough-edged scraps of thought,
so i steal from margins the time i have for writing: rip it
from the lower half backside of discarded legal documents.
i try to hide my writing:
hand-covering words to mask my slipping script,
i leave office in the evenings with pockets full of words
sloppily hiding the scraps of time i have stolen from their pay.
it is wrong of me but i am scavenger;
i build my civilization from your wasted scraps.




10/29/08
8/25/08 - takes about an hour to bus from city to office or back; i always felt a smear of guilt about getting paid to sit down watching city streets slip by.

mockery

i could scoff but what's the point?
you'll do me better, and if not
you, then you. i decline
to implicate or exonerate; all
points are lost between the artist, art and critic:
particularly when
i off the glasses and look again.




10/29/08 - rilke wrote that poetry must be purely internal, unconcerned with all external critique; i'll get the quote sometime.

engineer

go, go get your wrench! it's time
to be fixing things! like hearts
and minds, we'll fix
them all, because it's
time! and we
have all the wood and gears
and metal bolts you need!
go now, go
oh very quickly now!




10/29/08
8/15/08

boulevard Curious (whate blick)

whate shirts blick socks by day
blick shirts whate socks at night--
i live in puzzles. irony grins,
sweeping down the boulevard Curious
to query time-opposing prepositions.
but no-one cares, no-one knows;
(i suspect that no-one knows or cares
i know they don't) and i don't mind,
sweeping down the boulevard Curious
grinning silent all alone.




10/21/08
8/21/08

undergraduated

on strange-folding chairs i thought it would feel longer than it took because i never really cared about anyone else. the ones i loved passed years before or came in years behind. in point of fact i don't remember much: except for swimming in a sea of blank unknown unknowing faces at the end.



10/14/08

was poor

well they told me to eat shit and die, i guess, but i've always been an underachiever; i ate the shit and sat right there for ten little months and then got up and did something else, because i forgot to die.




10/14/08

perfect

driving, i was at seventy miles an hour--
(think of it, seventy!) but with only five
minutes to my name, i thought, Perfection!
how for centuries we have chased you,
up these mechanistic alleyways and
back down these tree-lined boulevards; but
having won the chase we dismayed find
you were, pursued, much more.




10/10/08

well.

I suppose, if I was pushed, it wouldn't have to be all poetry. Who can respond to this? There's no surface answer to poetry: nothing literate, nothing spoken.




10/7/08