These Days, When I Go to Write a Poem,

I can’t decide between Dreamweaver, Word, or Flash.

This whole question of commitment.

( I can’t say “I’ll see the thing through,” see,

“to itself” or even “to something else,” right,

because such a statement suggests

that any single piece of art has, not just a soul,

but a single soul,

an identity which is trying

to be, that the moment

of creation always

and necessarily means

one thing

and one thing only

is about to be, and must be,

born—

and I can’t say such a thing, see, I won’t say such a thing, because I am not

an “organicist.” At least, I don’t think

I am, anymore.

So the most accurate definition

I can make

for “creative commitment”

is: “seeing the thing through,"
hell, to anything.

But don’t we have some sense

of boundaries, of genre,

each time we begin?

Yes.

Then why do words

sometimes grow into things

we never anticipated?

I don’t know.

Ok then. So. Where am I?

*

As you can see, I’m a free

floating thinker. A teacher, long ago,

said my poems are spacey. They have a lot

of space in them. Genre and commitment. For M. M. Bakhtin, genres aren’t just

container-like forms; they are ways of seeing and being, shot through

with value, politics, commitment.

But what if, going further, we think of genre

not as perception

but as body?

I’m going to write a poem; I sit down at the desk:

what body will I be using?

what body will I be writing?

Except: do we really have any choice in this regard?

No. Face it. We each have one body only.

No, that’s not true. Our one body

is many bodies, depending.

That’s true.

So the question actually is:

which of the bodies which my one body is

will my one body be

right now?

At any given moment

of writing?

And it occurs to me, now,

that this is what people decide

in chat rooms and web logs and message boards, right? And MOOs?

All these new fangled electronic spaces

where people get to pick

identity? Though in poems, unlike email (maybe)

we have body. And isn’t my problem,

when I refuse or resist

any one genre (lyric poetry, language poetry, theory),

a problem of identity? Yes. I can’t choose.

And this is why, I believe,

I’m attracted to mixed

forms, hybrid genres…

(What do you think?

Too flat and pedantic?

Too much jabber? Too much horseshit?

Should I let my whole stupid process
show,
or should I cut

and leap, as we love to say,

like Emily

Dickinson’s

poems

ground down to the very non-line

between silence and language,

outside and inside,

referent and referee?

I say “non-line” because

I no longer believe

there’s a way out

of language.

But Dickinson comes as close

as one can, or—no, what I mean is,

her method, her poems,

enact a mind

when it’s trying to find and occupy and step
across the line. . .

What in the world am I saying? Is there, or is there not, a line?

No, yes;

I believe there is a line, but as Bakhtin might say:

the line is “open.” Forms and genres

are OSCILLATING FIELDS.

)Great word: oscillate.(

Awe

see

late.

*

Ok, so. Genre. Body. Openness. Choice.

I have always resisted the choices

others wanted me to make. I do a lot of things

with my body

which other women won’t.

I backpack in the mountains. I fly high performance kites. I go outside

and do things. In this regard

I have always been weird. Also, I think.

I.e., I do philosophy and theory, pretty intensely.
I’m amazing. I’m repulsive. I won’t recognize the boundaries

of body and mind

which others do. I’m a nerd. I’m a slob. I’m rationalizing

sloth and indecision. Did I trade social-sexual rightness

for freedom.? I wanted

it all, including food. And going after it all

meant I would certainly lack

in something. I wouldn’t

choose. I do like sex, yes—

I kind of love it actually—

but for periods of my life I wouldn’t trade

thinking and eating and doing things outside alone

for sex—or, no, I mean

I wouldn’t trade those things

for the personal-social perks

of couplehood, I guess.

This poem is getting truly weird.

I mean, these poems.

Making choices is generally considered

quite honorable. But, looking at my life, I notice that I keep trying

to find a way

around making choices. I want to reconfigure

the field of possible selections

to allow for more. More.

(Does, can, this idea work? Is oscillation

merely vacillation? Am I just rationalizing

indecision and self-delusion and cowardice?)

What if one’s choices

are equally weighed? Did what’s his name Lee

do the right thing

in choosing his southern home and state

when he went to fight the Civil War? Was he

honorable

because at least he did

choose, in a situation where choosing

was all he could do?

Or was he a coward, someone lacking

hard-core imagination

because he couldn’t make or find a choice

which adequately reflected

his pro-Union values and beliefs?

Or, finally: was his culture simply configured

in such a way that his values and beliefs

absolutely would not fit? So that no choice

was, or could ever be,
right?

In William Stafford’s poem about the deer,

the speaker makes a choice (for “us all”—his “only swerving”)

in a situation which is

untenable,

and so he’s a hero, right?

I used to love that poem, but—

couldn’t he have hauled the body in

and had a vet cut out the fawn or something?

I mean, come on: no one, including the speaker,

was willing to interrupt

their trip to a bar, or home, or wherever,

and bother with all the details anyway

involved with finding a vet and saving the fawn,

and therefore the speaker’s

decision to push the deer

over the cliff

means nothing, or very little. It means I don’t want to be bothered

with something I really don’t value

in the first place, and so the decision, the POEM,

is kind of full of shit. It makes moral choice

heroic and stoical,

or it wants to be about

moral choice,

but it’s not. The decision to kill the fawn

is equal to the decision

not to kill the fawn,

and so no choice,

no choice of significance,

is actually being made.

And now I want to say

that maybe choice itself

isn’t all

it’s cracked up to be. Fuck choice.

I think.

*

At what point in writing the poem

do I stop to see what the poem

is becoming? At what point in writing the poem
do I begin to make decisions

about what kind of poem

it will be? At what point in writing the poem

do I stop the flow of thought or feeling or association

and think self-consciously about form?

At what point does form

supercede content? Or rather,

at what point do form and content

separate? Or, if they’re never really one,

as some people believe, when do they move

into that dead relation

which makes for a crappy poem?

Making a firm decision regarding form

is precisely, maybe,

the point at which the whole thing dies.

These days, maybe,
every good poem is really about itself. Which is ok. Really.

Poems enact the making of selves, and the forging of moral choice,

and engagement with questions of language and freedom.

So a poem about poetry, or a poem about a poem

is not really just about poetry or a poem. It’s about a shitload more.

Deciding how a poem will proceed

is akin, isn’t it,

to deciding how a culture will proceed.

Right?

It isn’t heroic

to choose between two stupid

possibilities. It’s heroic to search out or make

new possibilities. Maybe stoicism

is just rationalized incapacity.

Maybe we need

to oscillate.

*

If I read any piece of writing

as poetry, what does that mean?

It means my bodies are paying attention.

*

Intuition invites reason in for a party.

Reason rhythmically and slowly

begins to stop thinking.

Then faster and faster.

*

I’ll just tell you right now, reader:
I break my sentences into lines

out of habit,

sometimes by phrase for aural balance,

and sometimes because the break

provides a pause

of various, mostly physical and gestural sorts—

and for rhetorical emphasis, visual

emphasis, ironic or funny effect,

smoothness or off

the wall but interesting awkwardness,

interesting awkwardnesses,

and just general swish and sway.

Sometimes I flat don’t know.

And lately I just don’t care.

(Well, that’s only partly true. Because note:

I have nothing against poems in traditional forms;

in fact, I like all kinds.

Though some kinds, it’s true, formal or not, engage my brain

and jack up my

adrenaline

much more than others.)

And so, dear reader, in closing:

if my line breaks here are a problem for you,

if your tastes are quite strict,

if you prefer a single genre of poetry

or a single genre of theory

(or a single genre of a genre of either);

if you’re irritated to no end

by raggedness and clumsiness,

major neuroses, minor desperation,

boring abstraction,

stupid yet persistent and possibly necessary humor—

if those things bother you, well,

put down this book right now

and fuck off.

No, listen: I didn’t mean that.

Yes, I did.