Rereading Frank O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto" this evening, as refreshment from a day spent in the tooth-pulling duty of revising my resume. (Is any less gratifying writing task imaginable? The headache's just now starting to subside.) As much as I love the piece, I was surprised by a line that I'd forgotten—and that has to be one of my favorite aphorisms ever:

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I don't ordinarily think of Frank as a Zen master, but I may have to revise that. It's practically a gloss on the Four Noble Truths.

The paragraph that follows is as clear (and genial) a statement of poetic intentions as I can think of, and a great spur to my own practice:

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

Much as I still love the beautiful high seriousness of Keats' letters, which I first read when I began discovering poetry, back in high school, this is a poetics I can live with. ("Personism" also has the advantage over most statements of poetics of being dead funny.) It's still founded on a notion of negative capability, but as an Americanized, vernacular anti-sublime.

And yeah, no politics in this post. Especially post-SOTU, I just want to spend a little time in a world where words actually mean things.

posted by michael  8:34:44 PM  
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