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I think one of the greatest things anyone has ever asked me is: "What does language require of you?"

Language, and mutual understanding, is often taken for granted, as though meaning is somehow packaged by our words and all it takes is someone else to unpack them simply by hearing them. In that way, we require a hell of a lot of language, such as performing the duty of creating meaning (which is in itself a hell of a duty). But we can't simply just say whatever we want (clear altogether is which too); language requires of us something too. But what is that, and when?

Thinking about this is one thing--language as I've discussed it now becomes not just a human invention that one uses but also a human invention that uses one--but what are the consequences of such a line of thought? What does language require of us? What is it that us are trying to say? How can we be heard and who can hear us?

Policy narratives

God. This is such a perfect case study of power, politics, and narratives. I want to study and be involved with this kind of shit for the rest of my life. As Tourism Rises in Bali, What to Do With Waste?

For W.C.W.

The pleasure of the wit sustains
a vague aroma.

The fox-glove (unseen)
the wildflower.

To the hands
come many things

in time of trouble
a wild exaltation.


-Creeley

Burglars

Oh my god, this analogy is hilarious:

"Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war."

Taken from the NYTimes.

Some notes mainly for myself

I've recently become concerned with the commonplace in poetry. Robert Creeley once said, "What is the common denominator? What is the commonplace? I mean, how do you get into that language? How do you get into that program? If one could just learn somehow how to get hold of how it is or what it is that one says so as to be utterly familiar to someone else" (Some Senses of the Commonplace). Following this, how can I, as someone attempting to write poetry, use language in such a way as to create a sense of place and time that people can relate to and that is both apparent to the reader yet allows the reader enough space to create their own places and times? How can a commonly experienced world come into existence through the use of poetry? There's a Creeley poem called "The Company" whose sentiments are the underlying framework of my current direction in poetry:

Recorders ages hence will look for us
not only in books, one hopes, nor only under rocks
but in some common places of feeling,
small enough--but isn't the human

just that echoing, resonant edge
of what it knows it knows,
takes heart in remembering
only the good times, yet

can't forget whatever it was...


I've been trying to get away from the wordiness that poetry can usually fall into when one isn't careful. Aram Soroyan was great in his ability to use austerely minimalist language to convey very lively events (by "lively," I mean in the sense of living--being alive--however mundane that might be). For example, in his book coffee coffee he accomplishes this with simple, one-worded poems, such as "oh". (The word is placed in the middle of an otherwise blank page). Taking things back to this most basic of levels allows both the reader and the poet enough breathing room to create something--whether it be a story, a thought, a feeling--, yet only be creative within the terms already laid down by the poet's choice of word(s)--in the above case, "oh".

Sarah's poetry has also influenced me in the same way that Soroyan has influenced her: poetry as a moment in time captured. Moments are inherently narrative and there's always a sense of playfulness when poetry tries to capture, or remember, a moment. They also create a sense of wonder, an open-endedness that doesn't restrict their story or feeling to simply one emotion, person, place, or time, although there is, somewhat paradoxically, a definite sense of emotion, person, place, and time in the poem itself. As Creeley once wrote, "There is each moment a pattern. There is each time something for everyone" (The Plan is the Body). Here's a recent poem of mine that attempts something like what Sarah and Soroyan were trying to do:



Hey
you withthe bike!


Oh.



It's going back to this minimalist rhetoric as way to create a sense of the commonplace that I've started to rethink written language itself (as it pertains to poetry). It's the beauty of direct and common speech which is most impactful when one is dealing with the commonplace. (To quote my poetry professor, "If you wanna say something, just say it!" That is, don't hide what you want to say beneath flowery and stereotypically poetic language. If you want to say "Fuck you!" then by all means, go ahead and say it. The common vernacular is beautiful in its stubbornness to hide itself).

Since I've been working lately on the transcription of conversations for an anthropology paper, I've run into the dilemma of whether or not to transcribe utterances according to the way they actually sound or the way they would be normally transcribed into writing. Of course, I've chosen the former. There's no way to get around the fact that written language is simply not the same as the spoken tongue, but in attempting to mediate that difference, one can (hopefully) create some greater semblance of place, and perhaps time, than the abstracted-from-actual-use written forms.

Following from this transcription method and the use of minimalism to portray the commonplace--the mundanity of everyday life (which doesn't imply at all that it's boring)--I've been trying to resort to the basest of written forms, that is, I've been trying not to use punctuation, proper spelling, or good grammar. Instead, punctuation only fulfills the role of spacing (like how a comma indicates a pause and a period indicates the end of an utterance), words are spelled somewhat phonetically (but vowels aren't put into the same phonetic categories of, say, Italian or Japanese: a = ah; e = eh; i = ee; etc.--I hate that shit), and grammar is taken apart to reflect thoughts as they occur--not to reflect speech as a cohesive idea that follows in any logical order--such as in this recent poem of mine:


last gulp
checks watch
wears glasses


As if I haven't already quoted Creeley enough, there's a poem of his that I can relate to very much, having grown up in the Northeast US (in a very forested part of Philly) and having spent a fair amount of my childhood (either physically or in memory) in upstate NY and Vermont. (Creeley was from Massachusetts). It creates such a profound sense of being-in-place; it's this kind of poetic style that I hope one day to be able to do, but in my own way.


These retroactive small
instances of feeling

reach out for a common
ground in the wet

first rain of a faded
winter. Along the grey

iced sidewalk revealed
piles of dogshit, papers,

bits of old clothing, are
the human pledges,

call them, "We are here and
have been all the time."
(First Rain)

Heroes

In all those stories the hero
is beyond himself into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death.

I thought the instant of the one humanness
in Virgil's plan of it
was that it was of course human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.

That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis-

dom lives on in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.



What is it about death that captivates us so?

I should have majored in paleontology and women's studies.

I should have majored in anthropology and economics.

Some more thoughts on my IS

It became clear to me earlier today, when I was rummaging through the library's books on language, the environment, and politics, that I'm going to need a really thorough understanding of environmental policy, the science behind it, its history, and the problems and implications of any policy, as well as a lotta shit about anthropology, linguistics, politics, and related fields, in order to do my independent study well. Man. This study is going to be the death of me. But I'm still unbelievably excited about it.

Another thing that became clear is that there is quite a lot of literature on climate change, while not so much on other problems, such as water. Actually, for all worry there is about the coming water problems a big chunk of the world will face, there is not a corresponding amount of research--anthropological or sociological--on them. Maybe this could be my project's focus: water policy. Ooo! I'm excited!

The People

I don't know what exactly it is, but I'm finding myself--once again, perhaps--surprised by reality. Maybe it's that I've become a little too bookish for my own good, or simply just disillusioned, but I keep looking up at the world and thinking, "Holy shit. This is actually happening." Climate change is occurring. People are living. I am typing this. The stories of history are real. Just think about that. Plato isn't just some figure in books, he was a real human being who actually walked the earth and looked up at the same sky and same clouds we do today. History is not some idea; it is what has actually happened. Jesus Christ! (who really existed).

I dunno. Maybe it's just the burgeoning understanding that I'm a part of a larger continuum--that I'm a part of some greater shared experience--that is just so unbelievable to me. And not at all in a bad way; rather, I'm just trying to situate myself in this way of looking at things, although it might make me feel uneasy and overwhelmed at times.

The poet Robert Creeley once wrote:

"Will it be that someday we come to some relation with those who make up our condition, humans, that will not argue their histories as all that they depend on for relation--or else, more accurately, that what they do is more relevant to all their lives, one by one or all in all, than what they didn't. I feel such trust in life, once I stop all that previous qualification--just that I know I'm alive, and witness it with such pleasure in others, we are here--I'm happy, in the most simplistic of senses. I've thought a lot, like they say, but more than that I've not found." (A Day Book)

IS

Wow, this is like, almost exactly what my independent study is going to be about: Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus