It's not that I want to say
It's not that I want to say that poetry is disconnected from having
something to say; it's just that everything I want to say eludes me. But if I
caught it I wouldn't want it and you wouldn't want it either. Maybe poetry
is what happens on the bus between wanting and having. I used to think it
was what happened on the bus between oakland and berkeley. And it was,
too, like violet texas in people voices, all kinda subtle transmission broke
off by stops and bells, repercussive riding, mobile contact, slow symposium.
Now, even in the absence of my office, I still want to move and so I have
to move but never get there in this whole extended region of not being
there, of stopping and saying not here, not here, and of that being, in the
end, pretty much all I have to say. What I want to say is that having
something to say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life
in somebody else's sound and grammar, its placement in my head, my
placement in the collective head as it moves on down the line. The
itinerant ensemble arrangement of the 40, and sometimes of the 15, is
where I started studying how to live in poetry. I want to transfer study as a
practice of revision on the edge, where ethics and aesthetics are in parallel
play. Some kind of homeless shift between reading and writing that
emerges in a set as our cut-up schedule, a willow's diverse list of things,
point to point restlessness, interlocking schemes of material breaks, the
constantly renewed syllabus of a new composers guild in the middle of
enjoying itself. What we come together to try to do starts to look like what
we do when we come together to enjoy ourselves, handing saying what we
want for one another to one another in and out of words.
