Caterina Fake has an interesting thread on poets who have written novels — itself a takeoff on an entry on Ron Silliman’s blog about “poets’ novelists”.

It’s interesting because a somewhat similar thread (on summer reading) surfaces every year on the John Zorn list, and it seems the usual people get mentioned: Gass, Gaddis, Dick, Murakami, Delany, Calvino, and so on. Not sure if this means that people who like their music somewhat more offbeat like their fiction the same way too…

The relationship (poets to novelists / poets to musicians) is obviously different. But I do wonder: What do poets — or people who like to read poetry — listen to?

The obvious choices are people in the scene, as it were, like Cage, Ono, Ashley, and Zorn (Lyn Hejinian and Myung Mi-Kim wrote a couple of the texts for New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands). But it would be silly to think that people who write poetry like their music a certain way as well.

Or are you all closet George Thorogood listeners?

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I was trying to figure out what to write about next when I looked through my notes on a future post — one on Eileen Tabios‘s poem “Parallel Universe” — and looked at the lines I’d scribbled:

Gazing through a screen/scrim.

Not black hole.

Primary colors. Of being detached.

Watching in slow motion.

The apostate that I am originally saw it as being religious in nature.

Poet’s universe is parallel universe.

On level of sentence.

About art, and the poet, and when will we ever meet?

Somewhere in there: “obviate.”

Prose with tiny beaks. Discrete events.

Strings tuning up for the last act.

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Some of you might like this: this is from Willard Price’s 1920 book on the Methodist Church’s missionary work around the world entitled Ancient Peoples at New Tasks:

“Any Filipino who can scribble dog verse is a songster, a new Shelley, a budding Omar Khayyam. The population of the Philippines is ninety-nine per cent. poets and one per cent. farmers.”

So wrote a critic of the Filipinos. He would not be correct in making such comment to-day. The work of the United States is transforming millions of easy-going, tropical “poets” into progressive farmers, manufacturers, and merchants is an achievement with few parallels in history.

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Surfing at less than 33.6kbps is — well, not really surfing. And so it feels a little odd as a blogger not really being able to read anyone else’s blog, at least until I return to San Francisco. I don’t what Tim Yu or MacDiva or any of these folks (I’m only filling in the urls from memory) are up to. (It doesn’t help that Blogger templates make extensive use of tables which have to be loaded in their entirety for the page to display.)

For instance, I completely missed out on the whole WinePoetics – CorpsePoetics name change — what was that all about? (I’ll have to look through the archives.) An Exquisite Corpse reference, perhaps? Lilacs from the cold dead ground?

The image that came to me, in any case, was not of death, but of sleep, though they’re close enough. As I’ve written before, I see words just before I go to sleep (I literally see them on a printed page), in that hazy period between oblivion and wakefulness — as if the unconscious prematurely takes over and starts filtering the dream-material before I’m actually asleep.

Hypnagogia, I think it’s called. Is that right? (Is hypnagogy, then, the act of receiving the words, as a pupil?) I seem to remember the music lore about either Richard D. James or Kevin Shields, who would keep awake for days at a time and then start composing.

Like last night:

The stammer of orchids.
The language of frost.
A container of bees.

Who knows what it means? I don’t. But I had to get up, grab pen and paper, and scrawl the words in the dark.

Then, a caption underneath a photograph of water:

The Ganges does not see you.

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Back when I was in sixth grade at the North Davis Elementary School in Davis, California — my folks were on sabbatical — I wrote a poem called “Life.” There was little about the poem — I should really say “poem” — that I remember, except for the ponderous ending (“Life is like / a long trip.”) and one sentence (“The river was / a ribbon of moon.”). Hey, it was sixth grade.

Then I didn’t think about poetry again for another 22 years or so, except for a detour through Eliot and Cummings in high school. But in the past few months I started plunging into it again, and the immersion has been life-changing, like learning a new language.

Then I started actually making them up just about a couple of weeks ago (see my “Hey, I Got Published!” post from a week back) — specifically, in Eileen Tabios‘s hay(na)ku form.

Indeed, I still have a couple about Madeline here, which I’m suddenly emboldened to post:

Your
eyes Your
lips and Your

Purple
kissed bruise
on: right knee.

And I’ve been thinking as well of organizing those dream couplets into some sort of series, like:

A tangle of horseflies.
The inadequacy of grass.

Peripheries of mollusk.
Inflection of sea.

Sheaves of punches.
The grammar of bees.

Then the best kick in the pants, as it were, was the following message from Eileen the other day:

Congrats to the winners:

Top Three Chosen By Judge Barbara Jane Reyes:

Tom Beckett
Jon Pineda
Dennis Somera

Other masterful hay(na)ku poets reveal themselves to be Stephen Kirbach, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Luis Cabalquinto, Kenneth Tanemura, Terri Leigh Relf, Kasey Mohammad, Benito “Sunny” Vergara, Bill Freind, Shirlie Mae Mamaril, Clayton Couch, Michael Snider, Michael Helsem and Rosanne Virata.

Please check the June 20, 2003 post at http://winepoetics.blogspot.com/ for more details.

Thanks to all participants; your words are a blessing,
Eileen

And in the company of real poets too!

All in all, I think, a nice beginning to things.

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