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Thursday, December 23, 2004 |
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Old John Crowlie's Anecdote
"My neighbors are good people. They're from Texas. The husband is the sweetest old guy you could know. He had a stroke. They're good people but definitely semi-... Well, you know. They're not 'academic.' He had a stroke and lost his speaking ability. I went to see him at the hospital. He gave me a look, real hard, with both of his eyes. Then he pulled my face down and kissed it--one cheek and both lips and then the other cheek. And I was kissing back. You know, I'm not one for kissing boys, unless they're family, but I tell you: I was kissing back." |
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This just in: I try to avoid using the word " synchronicity " unless the coincidence is too great to contain itself in that pedestrian word and a larger one is called for, one touched with a little magic.
This so seems like synchronicity to me. In today's mail, which I open after having written the preceding post, I find at random the following: "For me, the prose poem is a pure literary creation, the monster child of two incompatible strategies, the lyric and the narrative. On one hand, there's the lyric's wish to make the time stop around an image, and on the other hand, one wants to tell a little story. ... Impossible to write, illegitimate in the view of so many poets and critics, it must remain an object of ridicule to survive." [Charles Simic, Orphan Factory {"Poets on Poetry" series, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 47}] |
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Well, the goddess of poetry surely smiles wryly when she reads my latest plaint. She knows, as I can't seem to remember, that one doesn't write poems; they choose one to write them. Poems choose me to write them, and it is up to me to do right by the impulse, and not slack off with lame excuses. And not because someday I may have written a respectable verse. But because someone may read what I've written and go "ah." Someone else may find a pleasure in reading something I have tried to write as well as I could. That is why. I can't stop doing it. And I don't want to stop, once I get past each day's petty deflations to the truth of the matter. The key is not to fence myself in with definitions and genres and forms and exclusions. Creation is the point. All creation, and the Creator within each of us that seeks to manifest, that drives us to make. I do have enough years left to apprentice myself to poetry. Apprenticeship consumes the entire life of any crafter, probably. 10:48:28 AM  comment []
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