dbqp: visualizing poetics: January 2013

One Say

Last time there was a US presidential inauguration, we had an inaugural poem I thought was execrable, but Richard Blanco's "One Day," performed this year, was much much worse. Harkening back to Carl Sandburg, he gave us a confetti-like story of Americans working across the country and through sunlight and hard work. It was, I suppose, a populist poems, and one filled with enough egregious lines of queasy faux emotion to make me sick. So I took his poem and fashioned a new poem by lifting a few words from his, excising all the lard, making new words, and writing a fragmented little poem of my own. Still, I think it's better than Blanco's.

Jan

lightly.

lightly.

there is a fall to it, quite

it semes

(my intent was out)

filtered not favored,

yet its taste

[cold in a warm way . . .

presense

we came here to

, as well

the whole ocean of it

supine.

Jan

The Seeming Semiobject, More than Seen

Every poem is hermetic. Every response to a poem is a personal. We view the world through two holes out from the head we think within. We hear that world through two holes punctured through the sides of our holes, but again from the inside. We live inside our own respective skin, and there is the color of our own thoughts upon everything we encounter.

I think of how I make a poem: I make it for myself to see, because I don't know how anyone else's eyes work.

Jan

Apprehensions of the Past

I think

I am ready

to learn

how to write

(from my poem, "Overdrive / Aphasia in the Wortschatz / Beaufond")

To begin again, I look back.

Usually, I end the year with a review of my year in poetry, and it is always a messy and detailed thing, what might happen if a poet becomes an archivist, if an intellectual becomes a hoarder. Something like that.

Tonight, I'm thinking, it's best to have a simpler review. It's coming a week into this year of thirteen, after all. I am late, always late.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience

One Say

lightly.

The Seeming Semiobject, More than Seen

Apprehensions of the Past