Category: Blog

She’s on your side

Writing is kinda like this: lions and wild elephants chasing you through burning forests while bandits and thieves trip you up and tie you down and you’re saved by a mysterious flood that later leads to you drowning in evil spirits. In a spot like that you need you some Green Tara. You know who I’m talking about! The natural guardian and protector of all that which plague a writer.

Now then, you gonna need some White Tara too. It’s still the same Tara, but with your White Tara you get even more compassion with extra healing thrown in too. When the writing go wrong and you need some relief it’s the White Tara that’ll guide you along back to health and vigor!

Take both the Green and the White and let’s throw in some trickery because woman has a sense of humor love her for it! This is the ally that guided you so gently into looking away, and in that looking away is the poem. But, that times a thousand. That times a thousand more.

There’s a word for it

There’s a word for it,
that thing we’ve danced around all night, but never got to.
Those cross sections of the multidimensional, which I call continuum strands in my Poemcraft.

Poemspace is a dimensional shift which can occur in one of two ways: 1) naturally or 2) summoned by the dark arts of the seasoned wizard.

In cause the 1st you learn how to sense poems, how to hone in on them, and how to let them happen.

In cause the second you meditate, you empty, you transcend. The stained glass window shatters in a blaze of golden light, oh glory!

And praise and bless!

Buddhists have a word for it, the unity that welds whiplash tails of continuum in a single moment as he approaches enlightenment, awakening.

Poems are mini-awakenings!

In poemspace an infinite number of hungry mouths roar out of their egg sacs. They lunge and snap in infinite hunger. There is no hope no escape, all you can do is stay still and study the disfigured mouths. Look close behind those ragged teeth and torn lips and there are tiny Buddhas with semaphore flags. Each thousand mouths is a letter, each thousand thousand a lesson in dread.

In poemspace infinite lilies bloom infinite seeds of compassion. It’s true, there is one who awakened but chose to stay behind to empathize with tortured souls.

In poemspace now shifts to craft. That is… a tilt of the head and swirls of golden orbs flash in and out of here/now. Sometimes they leave streamers. Those streamers are the connections between dimensions, the strands of continuum—the things you go after.

Introducing Poemcraft

I feel an ideological shift afoot. I am documenting how it informs my understanding of and relationship to poetry. The working title of this construct is Poemcraft.

Poemcraft comes on the heels of A Soul in Progress which can be seen as the philosophical premiss (as opposed to antecedent) of Poemcraft. I did a lousy job documenting A Soul in Progress, although over time you may get your fair share of it—I have many many notebooks to transcribe which, I want to say, have a lot on the subject.

Over time I will bury ASiP alive, leaving no trace except for whispers and innuendo. Only those that remember Poemcraft was once A Soul in Progress will understand the decisions I made as that entity. There will be a surge of interest in seeking the original premiss. There will be a reaction to that. And eventually Progressive Proemcraft will emerge as the compromise. This is the way of the world.

Introducing Poemcræft A Rough Thing I Found (uncorrected)

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Undrafted, February 2015

Charnel grounds are dangerous, horrifying, chaotic places. None of the meat-eaters are picky about whether you are dead (except vultures). They are happy to eat living visitors. Unburied corpses also attract demons—in the Indian imagination—and are likely to produce ghosts and vetalas (zombies).

That’s as perfect a description of poetry as I’ve ever heard; and it’s marks a philosophical (if not ideological) shift in the direction of the whole shebang. It’s a long one in coming. Forty years, perhaps, or two weeks—it depends on what cross section you choose to pick.

asip documents

asips waits for poems to show themselves and then tediously works to shape them into acceptable works

poemcraft expierences
poemsrafts accepts poems will live or die on their own merit. the strongest and most adapt poems will survive. the rest will die.

Over the last weeks (or possibly lifetime) I have been pursuing if truth can exist outside ideology; how reality is defined by a society’s prevailing ideology. In my case that’s something like global neoliberal consumerism under constitutional republic…is, beyond that,  hierarchy. scarcity. power and control.

I have been trying to find patterns in the thoughts and attitudes that don’t thrive here. This thin slice of spectrum is corrosive to deep exploration. I am impatient for the lack of fellow explorers; the lack of a possibility to have fellow explorers.

What if our demons aren’t so easily written off as codified mind states. What if our demons are completely real and hungry valid, and go by Indifference and Suspicion? You damn well better have some poems ready, because that’s what they eat.

Charnel grounds struck me as a revolutionary buddhism for the oppressed and dispossessed

The former name of the site, A Soul in Progress, reflected the philosophy that instantaneous poems that pop in and out of daily life are to be deliberately observed. Poemcraft begins with the understanding that reality, the whole chaotic mess, is the poem.

A Soul in Progress would painstakingly test the nuanced meaning of very word. Swirl through his dictionary looking for the closest possible match, and end up with a poem you could be proud of.

Poemcraft demands respect be paid the emergent poem.

asip finding
pc searcing/accepting/nourishing

A Soul in Progress was a nice leisurely stroll through a curated garden of illusionary discontent. Of loss. And guareded searching. It allowed me to see

socialist

Poemcraft is  an unfiltered

anarchist

but it’s fucking scary out there surrounded by the undead chorus of insistent poem.

Popping and going faster than you can capture. Faster than you can strive off. Blurs of gholish streaks.

The observant buddha will recognize I have changed the title of this site from A Soul in Progress to Poemcraft.