long to have some chat with her

i always thought proetry (prose-poetry, that is) was kind of a load. i mean, not the proems themselves necessarily, but the idea that the proem exists in some new and wildly experimental space (wildly experimental i say), the space where theory crosses theory and everything can finally be crystallized into an explanation--exciting newnesses to caress with minds, except of course that proems that enter that crossey-crossey space without taking the time to be poems (or prose) first make me crazy.

the reason that i was so into proprieception when it crossed my landscape was that, a., try as i might, i could form no clear mental idea of what olson was talking about, and therefore the theory had to bypass thought and enter to some extent into my body, and b., it so obviously came after the fact. That kind of writing about aesthetics is actual aesthetic writing, for me. Sometimes theorizers manage to be much clearer than Olson ever seems to be; that's okay, as long as what they're going for isn't an end, but rather something like a trampoline, or a window... To apply the idea of the mutable foot to Williams' poetry, for example, is possibly a good exercise, as long as you understand that Williams came up with the mutable foot after writing in it for a while. Either that (I don't know the history, as always), or he came up with the phrase and thought "that sounds KICK-ASS; i should try that. mutable foot. yeeah."

cuz that's how we do it in america. i think there may be nations out there where you can think everything through to the last degree--where you can cushion yourself in theory, you can upholster an entire room in theory--and still be able to come up with something that isn't a crock, but america isn't one of those nations. for the most part. i feel like i can talk this way because theorizing about what it means to be an american poet is one of the time-honored traditions of american poetry...most of the people who've done it before me knew what the hell they were talking about, but i think i can imitate cheaply because it's late and i'm wired and this all has been festering ever since we went to the hess winery and saw the bacons.

francis bacon was a theorist i can get behind. he insisted, as far as i remember, that he wasn't painting representatively. everything he painted was so horrible that representation seems impossible to get away from. but the closer you look at his stuff--and due to the shifting styles of the painting, you have to look closer and closer; his pictures are constantly in motion--the more you see that his own theoretical framework was the only acceptable one. his paintings can be interpreted as nothing but themselves. the screaming pope isn't a picture that condemns popes to screaming; it's instead an image of a thing. it is itself. it doesn't depict; it can't. all words slip from it, because it's beautiful but it can't be beautiful, terrible but it can't be terrible...in a sense, bacon successfully painted that thing beyond language that derrida--and lovecraft--and st. augustine--talk about.


what does the above discussion have to do with ANYTHING? i guess what it is is i'm feeling the allure of the proem recently, and am wondering how far i ought to indulge my curiosity. pretty far, i think. but i don't want people looking at my proetry and saying, "man, see how it straddles the line between prose and poem! MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE??? (and the days flow by, and the water flowing...once in a lifetime, water flowing underground)". because once you've gone there, you've cut yourself off from man and beast. because what the hell can you say about a proem aside from the fact that it's both prose and poetry? i guess you can go into the ways in which it's both prose and poetry, but these ways, as anyone who has taken a modern poetry class can tell you, are woefully thin on the ground. "it rhymes yet is in paragraph form? what is this strange beast of a work? MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE???" hopefully you see what i'm getting at.

i shouldn't browbeat my father about the fact that i like doing homework now.