free poetry
i just found these recordings of readings from the Poetry Project Marathon at St Mark’s Church in New York City on New Year’s Day 2012 which i had the good fortune to attend, i hesitate to say anything about it at all at least partly because i am still shy of the personal a, and b because there are facets of the personal which are really magnificently uninteresting and horrendous i still don’t know how poetry gets away with them and equally how it could seek to be constituted by anything else, even as i try continually to mash the personal and the general into one crystalline fist / rainbow growth — sucking a sugared lemon — and how do you write poetry without the personal, and how do you understand the world outside of the subject-object thing if you aren’t levitating in a cells-dissolving present moment which prevents even simple things like making stew — okay but CAConrad, Patti Smith and John Giorno were particularly stunning that day, each touching on particular things about poetry-if-you-ask-me that hurt, Conrad (‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? how about don’t kill and say whatever you want’), Smith in gratitude and plenty, and JG’s assertion about poetry resonating in particular as ‘a noble effort, doomed, but the only choice’, oh woe poetry with your broken old breaking old heart, being large and small by turns every other day, last night SO SMALL, the night before EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD. anyway it was good to feel so resolutely immersed in my fellow noble doomed creatures of craft that day, an auspicious start to the year, walking home in the cold dark cupping a small object in my palm imagining it as a concrete metonymy for grace———-you know, when poetry isn’t free it’s cheap, and that’s one of the best things about it, there is no such thing as expensive poetry and if there was it would suck
7 notes /
