"I LOVE WRITING" MAIDEN VOYAGE appendix: self-appointed and unwieldy meisterwerks

this is like a treasure chest of usernames

koogs that is an astonishing memory - BIRDS have often featured in my writing, along with trains and suchlike

I was tackling this in my lunch break. Very impressive my man, you can clearly do this - only midway through as yet but I like it. The "I set off at 2:54 pm..." line is fabulous.

aw thanks :) well one day I might write the Complete Concordance - there's a load of things without obvious explanations (and a whole load of interconnected wordplay)

the most basic advice is to think of it as a treatise on nomadism, be it as a philosophy of unpredictability and anti-authoritarianism or a struggle between formal poetic and the limitless possibilities of the page - always seeking the 'poem' and (almost) always running away from it at once

but also it's a freewheelin' trip through my consciousness, the closest I could get to a meta-autobiography at the age of 21. how conceited! that 2:54 pm line actually all happened

imo, the best poetry is always connected to something immediate and real to the poet, and the best images generally have a concrete antecedant in the poet's experience, even in very abstract poems.

not exactly a meisterwerk, but unwieldy enough to warrant posting here: this long prose screed, penned at some point last year, right after reading two Bernhards in two days:

This is all, you see, premised upon an endless sequence of things to renounce. It begins when one sees people who are happy but contemptible, and therefore renounces happiness, one turns instead perhaps to knowledge, but then of course one sees people with a great deal of knowledge whose knowledge has amounted to nothing, and now one renounces knowledge as well. One wishes to create, but one must create the right thing, there are countless things which have been created and which are worthless or worse, and then of course if one can judge the worth of a creation then there must exist some other value, something external which is satisfied (sometimes, at least, even if it happens only once in a hundred thousand attempts) — something which can be satisfied through the act of creation. But then of course if this creation is simply a means to an end, then it may not be the most efficient means, perhaps one squanders a great deal in creating, and would be better off knowing what exactly is being sought, that one might plot the straightest course to it, and so now one is back to knowledge, one is a searcher and a questioner. And this search is no better than the creating, for just as there are a hundred thousand worthless creations littering the world there are a hundred thousand thousand fruitless searches traced among them, one will almost certainly be destroyed by the search before anything has come of it, and one is not so foolish as to embrace self-destruction, which has been romanticized to death and so, like all that has been romanticized, must of course be renounced. Perhaps one is tempted by ennui, but even this has been romanticized, even nothing is romanticized, poetry rings the void, and it all must be renounced. In the end one can find nothing else to cling to but this principle of renunciation, and this being done, one feels that at last one has found a bit of solid ground, one holds fast to renunciation, one is afraid of losing renunciation, and so even if something better were to come along, one's first instinct would of course be to renounce it! And this is how we lose the world to gain renunciation.

(it looked more impressive in manuscript, spread out over 3 pages, with appropriately crazy handwriting. oh well)

^^ ok, now take that sort of thinking and instead of writing a 3 page screed asserting it, write a story that illustrates it with such veracity and power that by the time the reader has finished it, he knows your thesis is true, even if he can't articulate it.

Once you're warmed up, you can follow through with your Grandmaster novel.

blew up/melted down my poem tumblr recently but at least I got the following long joke out of it...

BLOOD LETTER 0:
I fell with constellations
carved into my back,
the blood streamed to
the bottom of the globe
and gathered in
drops dripping down
towards the floors
of hells that lie
in distant galaxies;

and freezing as they fell, I figured
they should some day shatter
and be scattered on some distant rock,
or else consumed for fuel inside
a star from southern skies, where —
never matter, never mind;

you who read and are upon this earth
still warm and open to explore
and full of tunnels carved in stone,
with silent patience, in the darkness,
by the other dripping things
that shared a purpose with me once;

you robot workers, left to rust
in ghost towns, ever hoisting up
skyscraper spears of molten steel
and frozen crystal to defend against
the hungry and advancing void;

you people, still with no idea
how you come to be between the
teeth of one beast or another
you would rather did the honors...

BLOOD LETTER A:
housing sanity and art,
all whose achievements have resounded
to its name throughout the ages,
still it wears and slowly loses
what would designate the heavens,
and the absence is remarked
upon the line as it traverses
the two faces of the mountain,
tracing where there will be only
empty space in some amount
and shape
in time
it starts to count...

BLOOD LETTER K:
… and well, what can I say
when I have had the wide world
kicked away, when
everything remains
outside my head,
the way Kant said
things-in-themselves
would always stay,
unknowable — I know
this cannot feel okay,
but hope that
it will be, some day,
I think,
and often of you,
and therefore I am and love you.

BLOOD LETTER (to) LA,
land of infinite unflagging
language speaking people
in a global babble laughing
singing shining and inventing
digging deeply in the soil
for the gold that was embedded
by the stars in their exploding;
and the products of your labor
are the things I will remember —
which has something of the flavor
of a burden, I would wager.

BLOOD LETTER ND,
the place to stand
I spoke of long ago and
somewhere else, I think,
was only a confusion

of the language with its
feet already planted
in the graves of other men
and dancing, standing
sometimes still, but mostly
waiting for a

-nother day
to come and
slowly going dumb under
the sun that hopes to
split and spill their
guts like secrets;

and although
I won’t pretend
that I have understood completely
all the words that I have written
and the sounds I have emitted,

still I would be lying
if I didn’t
feel already
that it was the

bernard snowy, post your poem here

imago, I shall!
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzQXoTlQlvc5MnhKd3lHRk9PYWc/edit?usp=sharing&pli=1

whatever happened to l0u1s jagg3r, anyway

http://i411.photobucket.com/albums/pp194/slangballad/whoknows.gif