Tag: writing

Curiouser and Curiouser

Published on April 14, 2025

There’s a pet theory of mine that says if you’re nine years old, having reached the third year of elementary school, and you don’t love to read and have at least some middling skills at it, your life is going to be from that point forward much simpler, much less colorful, and to no small degree, much more difficult. Maybe it’s because I started reading at four, and by the time I was in first grade I was reading at a 6th grade level (apparently, the point on the yardstick at least 50% of Americans find themselves).

It doesn’t matter what you read, actually. Comic books, fairy tales, road signs, cereal boxes, adaptations for young people, television subtitles. Reading IS fundamental. Not only because it increases the scope by which you view and interpret the world, and the infinite names by which you can label at endless variety of phenomenon and objects, but because it exposes you, even if only by osmosis or accidental seepage, to ideas. And ideas, particularly those you formulate inside your own mind based on your personal experience, are powerful and sometimes magical things.

Seeking out opportunities to read is critical to the development of one of the most important qualities of humanity: curiosity. There is a sadness, and even a danger, to creatures who possess no sense of wonder at how things are the way they are – and a desire to find out why. In animals, that lack of a why gene typically makes for very dull and short lives. A mouse in a maze with no sense of fuck around and find out will very rarely get the cheese, and more often than not, by not noticing and keeping track of the warning signs along the path, is likely to find the cat instead. Yes, you may get a chunk of old bread, or in the case of a butterfly, a really unappetizing bit of pollen, but unless you’re interested in experimenting at least a little, your unexamined life is pretty pointless.

In humans, a lack of curiosity is even more dangerous. If you can imagine yourself as a being that never, ever in any circumstances, asks for more information, for clarity, for some underlying principle or justification – well, if you CAN imagine that, you’ve probably got a little curiosity. Thank goodness. But you know people without curiosity, certainly. They are dry, flat, and unprofitable, for the most part. They may do well in school, where the actuarial tendencies of mediocrity are so capably reinforced and encouraged. They will rise, it is said, to the highest level of their incompetence – and stay forever stuck in an amber life which might as well be heavily medicated, for there are no real highs or lows. That’s survival, not living, isn’t it? Churning out widgets and children who will count widgets for another few ages. Maneuvering through one set of boxes after another, opening the door of one prison cell to only find yourself in a series of ever larger, ever more comfortable ones, but never really getting a window to what’s beyond the gates.

Imagine being a writer in such a world. John Waters once quipped that if you go home with someone and find out they don’t have any books in their home, don’t have sex with them. But somehow or another they keep breeding, don’t they, these non-curious, non-reading, non-essential, and ultimately, non-entity things that pass themselves off as human beings. Don’t get me wrong – they’re not monsters, most of them. Being a monster, or at least an interesting villain, requires imagination and curiosity.

There are a lot of reasons to write. Most of them involve communicating, entertaining, educating, or enlightening, to some degree and in some combination or another. All of it, ultimately, is about inspiring the reader to continue on their way, using what you’ve written as a guidepost, touchstone, fuel, or fodder. Human beings are consumers. They ingest to live. How that life turns out depends a lot on the quality of the intake. In more ways than one, garbage in leads to garbage out. Sometimes that refuse makes for great fertilizer. Other times, not so much.

The reasons for reading are likewise myriad. But if at least one of them isn’t because simply expanding your world of ideas is a personal imperative, then you’re really missing out. Reading is fundamental.

14 APR 2025

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Talking Loud is Saying Nothing

Published on April 2, 2025

When you start writing about your life, who are you writing for? Who is your audience? It takes a certain amount of conceit to believe that anyone is or will ever be interested, of course, but say we’re past that hurdle. Who is reading this now? I know a whole lot of people, having had human encounters now for 60 years. But we may have never met in the flesh. I may not know your name or what you look like. And your only experience of me may be through these words, or through words or images you’ve seen elsewhere that take some sort of stab at describing me or my actions in this life.

But RD Laing suggested that’s really all we have anyway. Our experience of each other – not any kind of deep knowing or grokking, but a projection of ourselves that like the filter of a historian colors whatever I see of you to be whatever I think you most likely should be. We are impressionists, not photo-realists. To be honest, most of us haven’t even developed any skill at all with brushes or other artistic implements, and are busy dirtying our hands with paint on recycled construction paper. We look to philosophers to be our abstract expressionists. We stand in front of their works and nod our heads knowingly, but all the while are really confused as to what is being communicated. Because, of course, communication can only occur between equals. Between parties that consider the other party a useful equivalent to themselves. When we really talk, it’s to ourselves.

Interestingly enough, that conversation can actually be useful. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. It may also be true that when the teacher is ready, students appear. Everything is just one end of a stick. Everything else is the other end. There is no cause without an effect, nor effect without a cause. As I’ve said before, it’s turtles, all the way down.

The nice thing about talking to yourself is that you’ve got a captive audience. No matter how you try, it may be possible to dull the sound, or temporarily hit the mute button, but ultimately, because the sound of your own voice is created first instead your head before it hits your vocal chords, you can’t turn off the endless stream of chatter you provide yourself on a daily basis. Honestly, even listening to the void, or emptiness, or Nothingness, is still using your brain to kick-start something.

So maybe everything we write is just an extension of that self-talk. We throw our thoughts on paper just to prove to ourselves that we have them in the first place. The only thing we actually have of ourselves, if you consider the Buddhist idea that we’re just temporary aggregates anyway, with no permanent or abiding substance, is our experience of ourselves. It’s not, as Descartes put it, that “I think, therefore I am.” It’s that we are what we think we are, and nothing more. Once we stop thinking about it, that sense of separate identity, individual essence, isolation, smallness, and independence slips away. Form is nothingness. Nothingness is form. It’s not that we realize our connectedness or interdependence, either. Those words and concepts become meaningless, irrelevant. Remember, it’s two ends of the same stick. And there’s no stick.

Rumi said, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.”

But a true conversation with our self is beyond even that field. There are no words or sounds or even vibrations. Just the ghosts of who we thought we were once, communicating via osmosis to projection of who we think we are now, translated by who will believe we will someday become.

02 APR 2025

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A run through the poetic forms

Published on November 3, 2010

As much as I laud those who attack National Novel Writing Month with great zeal, I am a poet not a novelist. So in my own parallel to NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided to once again work my way through each of the poetic forms identified in my old standby resource, Lewis Turco’s Book of Forms: Revised Edition starting with the acrostic and ending with the virelai – hitting all the Irish, Welsh and other forms and meters along the way. I’ve done this in the past – I’ll try to post a poem a day, which may take us through the new year.

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I am so sick of poets

Published on May 10, 2010

I am so sick of poets, in real life and found online;
how they tend to wax poetic, and pretend to be sublime
when describing some quite minuscule and unimportant thing:
the dewdrop on the lily, a mosquito’s lacy wing.

With pretense they have pretensions, and expect to be profound;
particularly when their fancy talk has drawn a crowd around,
and every word that drops like nectar from their honeyed lips
is guaranteed to break a heart, or at least, sink a ship.

But worse are poem lovers: those sad, sycophantic thralls
who quote their favorite bards by name whilst walking through the halls,
and without grace or courtesy, expose the world to verse
that often only merely stinks, but sometimes, is much worse.

Not everyone can hold a tune, or expect that their voice
will earn them any supper, if the listener has a choice.
Likewise, because you cast in rhyme a metaphor or two,
and hang a shingle (or a website), does not make true

that you are either poet, or can recognize the same;
such things are proven over time, and not by just a name
applied by those who dare not prick your bubble of esteem
for fear their own imagined greatness will be robbed of steam.

I am so sick of poets; every single one I’ve met
is either spent and sick and sad, or hasn’t happened yet.
In either case, I have no interest in their point of view
unless it can be spoken in a simple phrase or two

that doesn’t count on me to picture some fantastic scene,
and waste my time imagining I know just what they mean.
Dispense with all that sentiment, and vivid imagery;
a life that needs a poet is a boring life, indeed.

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On the Professional Diarist

Published on April 23, 2006

There must be something more to it,
some sense behind the scenes,
a glimpse of meaning not quite shared,
or else my mind’s not keen
enough to understand the point
of merely keeping track
of each new day’s minutiae;
the long hours looking back
on what appears so trivial
would seem to waste, in turn,
great spans of time recording it;
who has such time to burn?

And why think such small moments
are something to be shared,
imagining some audience
is out there, and will care?
I wonder, in a thousand years,
will my old grocery list
of little peeves and daily notes
stand out from the great mist
and find interpretation
as the cipher that unlocks
the soul of this time that we’re in,
or if it’s just a crock.

23 APR 2006

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For Bukowski

Published on October 4, 2005

Believe it … poetry can heal wounds;
of course, an awkward, ill-set bone
will sometimes need to be re-cracked,
and soft illusions that so gently cradle us
to bind the flesh beneath, must go.

And often, language is so poor
a conduit for what needs said
that poetry, to remain true,
must eschew words and simply ape,
pretending to be civilized.

In drunken rages, curses slurred
and spewed into a sewer’s maw,
a poet finds epiphany;
and if not driven to reveal
that underbelly, often pawns

off lesser dreck to pass as art,
or spends their time in all-night shops,
dissecting life with coffeespoons.
Let he who is well understood
explain such mincing words. Pray tell:

What inner demons exorcised
conduct themselves with grace and charm?
The world needs screaming, now and then,
and herds of pigs snorting, pell-mell,
beyond decency’s cliff.

04 OCT 2005

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As if the hazel mud

Published on July 20, 2005

As if the hazel mud
its edges flecked with dull green
and salt-stain,
cracked and peeling along
the summer dry edges
of the viaduct
that ran its length,
a brittle concrete spine,
down through the
creosote valley
from cinder block to overpass
were somehow host
to hordes of unseen ghosts
where once the heartless roots
of dandelion split
the grey white skin into
psoriasis scabs and lesions.

That’s how the city’s heavy
mid-July became a poem;
rending itself, in slow catharsis,
from some meaningless
overpass photo op
into a metaphor
of urban blight.

As if that were enough:
to use each word from that
threadbare thesaurus,
marking up the boring proof
that being marble, made a statue,
with no sign of art
beyond the lexicon
of vague pretension.

That’s how you become a writer:
just convince yourself
your vision isn’t just another
meaningless sight.

In your world, I can never be a poet.

20 JUL 2005

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