Archive for 2013

I see this as you stating the same thing many great poets eventually do with a sigh when all they see around them are people in love with how well they can masturbate through words (“Look at how nude they are, how sexy, how shocking, how they allude to nature, to the heart, the good, the dark, the esoteric. Look! Look!! Look how I cry!!!”).

Why do people enjoy this? I want to read poems that move like wrecking balls. And that transform me into the building they long to touch. // Tomás Q. Morín

Good poetry is the difference between just having sex and making love. It is making love; it’s old news and the odds are against you before the very act and yet you participate. And you participate with an open-heart because you know that you’ll never reach that sweet release all emotionally closed up like that (this is old news). It holds yet destroys you completely, and it’s drawn-out yet over too quickly. It’s Continue Reading →

Things you will find all over the world: McDonald’s, Starbucks, Torontonians, Melbourners, Londoners, and Edokko. Rewording P. Lockwood, “A city cannot visit any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives away its people. Well, except for the US.” The US is a haphazard collection of psychic cities, all screaming, “Fuck you, hold my beer, my dreams will come true.” They walk through the streets and will not even see the sights, too full they are of the sights.

Make time for it, and only it. And above all else, don’t trust yourself.

A writer should always be the first person to wake up and work, that’s the only way anyone will take you seriously. That’s the only way you’ll take yourself, seriously. Remind yourself that you want to be— no, are a writer, a person who writes words; but don’t trust your moods or your loves of them. They, moods and loves, though wonderful, wax and wane to and fro, and those grounds aren’t stable enough to build anything on. Keep a strict schedule of an austere mindset that’s, at minimum; three parts self-chastisement, four parts unavoidable, and five parts very very simple. Ridicule yourself for not putting pen to papers or fingers to board. To paraphrase poet Ilya Kaminsky, “A blank page is the white flag of your surrender.” Only cowards surrender, and the last thing you want to be is a coward.

I’ve set things up so that the first things that open up as I login around 5AM are a blank page and the day’s schedule, and after that I remind myself of what I want and don’t want to be.

To paraphrase Theodore Roethke, one of the greatest poets to ever bleed on page, “Poetry is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.” And to expand on my first pseudo-mentor Charles Bukowski, “When you’re a cup of coffee away from brimming with total mad darkness but are still imbued with that love of life, you’ve got to repeatedly empty yourself. Again and again.” But that (my) love of life is very uncompromising, especially when my very being is on the line. My love demands that I not use this means of calculated spilling as a substitute for sobbing or acrobatics; that I not waste its time by masturbating in public like that. It demands that I be whole, and nothing less, if only for a while.

What I’m trying to say is that Continue Reading →