the brain alone and sulking in the skull

repetition is the way you go about making something again, something entirely different than the first thing. gertrude stein has this.

sometimes my words get caught in a trap, like elvis, and they abstract the same thing over and over. for a long time (three years?) the thing was quasi-real (emphasis on the quasi)--it's gone into a mode of entire abstraction, however, which means that the poetry can focus absolutely on one thing without carrying any burden of narrative. this sounds fancy, especially considering all i'm really saying is that these poems aren't in real time, or particularly meaningful.

i stink at poetry. i'm not a poet. but i don't stop doing it, in part because i have no shame, and in part because of this possibility of non-narrativic insight (to whatever false degree)--a few years ago i was writing about a poem a day, and though none of them were good, they all helped me realize that forcing yourself to think in poetry is productive. just not necessarily productive of good poetry.

i guess i'm attempting to excuse myself for writing the same poem over and over. if you can never arrive at the truth of a thing, you can never fully express the thing. yet by expressing and re-expressing a thing, you end up expressing something--a truth, borges style, not the truth--like that varicolored lantern in roger corman's the terror (a weird point of reference, but it's what rings the bell). none of this is interesting, i'm pretty sure. but i think the boring observations are necessary...occasionally necessary. because otherwise you end up with "the kingfishers," which is brilliant, but doesn't touch gwendolyn brooks.