The Inspyrreon

Sometimes, its odd, even to me, but I can still remember what I read that originally led me to write poetry myself. I was a teenage kid, and I had a tendency, well, call it a predilection to think about odd images. My first journals were books which were more less descriptions of inventions. The first books I can remember reading in grade school were, and I am pretty certain I didn't have any interest in books until the 3rd grade, because until the 3rd grade our school library wasn't quite open or something, they were moving it. At any rate, I don't remember being able to check out regular books until then. I do remember earlier children's books, especially Dr. Seuss, and one that I look for sometimes, but which I have failed to find, about an old woman who lives in a Victorian mansion with a mouse, a yak, and a crocodile who all dress in fine clothes. After that, the first book I remember reading by my own selection was the Life of P. T. Barnum By Phineas Taylor Barnum. I don't recall if I read the entire thing, or not. I also recall reading in 3rd grade something called The Inventors which was a book I can recall easily because of its silver cover. It was a silver hardback book, and it seemed very important to me, and I remember checking it out over and over. I also remember reading things like Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, and lots and lots of folktales, especially things like Folktales of Ancient Egypt, Aesop's Fables, Grimm's, etc. What first stirred an interest in poetry for me was a friendship with an older boy in Junior High. We played tennis together before school in a group game we called back then Around the World where lines of boys would gather on either side of the court and one boy would serve and one return, and then the server would run to the other side and get in line, and you had to keep the ball in play. If you lost a point, or hit it out 3 times, you were out. I had written a some phrases on one of my notebooks.

You live a meagre existence, garbage man.

and

The natives are restless down Burundi way.

Now I really did spell meagre that way, because somehow I had glommed onto various Britishisms
even by that time, and still today my habit is to spell Theater as Theatre. As for the Burundi reference, I was an avid Stamp Collector, and knew most of the world's countries by heart, and even knew what they themselves called their own countries. Things like Norge, and Helvetia, Shqperia? for Albania? The boy saw this, but he thought the first one said:

You live a bigger existence, garbage man.

At any rate, for most of Junior high, I would be trading one liners like this for fun.
Nevermind their odd classist and colonial content. :) I guess that's just how I rolled?

Well, In highschool, I was sort of already a stoner as I had started smoking marijuana in junior high with my cousins, and also with some early friends, some Mexicans, and half Latinos who lived in the neighborhood near the junior high where I went. They had a fake gang called Los Aztecas which was more or less because one of the kids had a dad who was the Vice-President of The Scorpions motorcycle gang. That kid's name was Doodle. So, in highschool I started listening to the Doors. And then I read No One Gets Out of Here Alive. And then I started reading all the books listed in that book, and what got me started writing was two books.

The Journal of Albion Moonlight, by Kenneth Patchen
and
Love's Body, by Norman O. Brown

and even today, Brown's definition of Poetry still seems right to me, or rather his totalizing de-definition of poetry which makes it powerful and gives it its revolutionary meaning, and also its secret banality as simply 'the possibility of marking'.

Here are all the references for 'poetry' I could find in Love's Body

And so I guess this is why I have a COMPLETELY different approach to writing and reading in general than what I see today with all the stylistic, and polemicist variations that take the foreground of the poetry and art scenes. Honestly, I really don't care what any particular poet, or artist is saying, or think they are saying, because for one thing, their experience will never be my experience, and secondly, I simply am not capable of abstracting out or extracting all the particularities of their sense of the thing, and it just seems like more work than its worth. I have a creative, and rather hedonist approach. I take my own meaning from everything. I live and think poetically, and I have a rich enough experience that often when something is explained to me about something, I end up preferring my own subjective experience of the same artifact.

And I don't know all the references to this, but I have seen things about the problematical and perennial debate about subjectivity and personal response in and around both poetry and art. We all have aesthetic sensibilities, and at this point after nearly 100 years of an anti-aesthetic tradition within the arts, who can possibly tell the difference between the two?

I don't know if I've ever read an entire Wittgenstein book, but I do remember him using the wheel as a metaphor of thought, and I think he said something like, and this is a total lannyq paraphrase

Success in thought is whatever it takes to keep the wheel of thought moving.

And so I connect that to something else, and heaven knows where I got this, but I seem to recall
an ars poetic trope about poetry being about "turning"..

So then Wheel and Turning lead me to Robert Graves strange story about the Egyptian god Thoth
who he says came from a little known fact that Cranes stuff their gullet with fishes and then lay them out
on the banks in a radiating pattern like the sun, so it can see them, like the spokes of a wheel, then re-gorge them stacking them in an order which is more comfortable to their innards.

So then after that, and I think I picked up disjunctive synthesis from a book on Zaum I read when I was about 19.

W -I see as wave
heel

Wheel as wave-heel
but also as H as hearth
for

Wheel as wave-hearth-eel
and I do this to poetry as well

poor earth tree

and pool means tree in Finnish I believe.

pooltree.

 I always enjoy hearing about where various schools and folks take their meaning, how they construct it, and why, but I just couldnt ever get that invested in it, as it just isn't as fun or entertaining as my own carefully wrought native system. I mean the thing goes blank, and it gets stale from time to time, but then I usually move the register over to the visual, or over to the statistical probability for being itself which is still the most

wondrously large and oddly be-wild-and-erring thing there is..

Live is a marvel, period.

Bless it. Let it be, and bild.

Let wild bees flow like honey from your pentagram nipple-nostril arrays..

never erase your thoughts, and let them be the gold of midas

to the altouch
the altorch

the although.

May you resieve the blessings of the Jellybean Weirdo This day
and be glad upon the earth

and

moltifly

for this land, this angle L-and

vertical-virtual
horizontal-substance

continu-s

The Inspyrreon reamends..

XOXOXO