Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
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Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’s.
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You ask great questions. I think I must not trust myself to reach a peaceful ending after those moments of struggle–but what a silly thing to think, that we need peaceful endings!

Of course it’s more complicated than that–I must not trust my reader to follow me into and through the struggle. I was trained to read and enjoy straight-up lyrics and to study or struggle through reading Modernist poetry with it’s ruptures of consciousness. Maybe I associate those ruptures with work, and I’m just a lazy reader (and writer), and I worry my readers would see something true about me in those moments–my own inattention, perhaps, my laziness. In which case, I might crave privacy.

I’m probably also afraid of becoming more like Gertrude Stein–who’s all rupture and hardly read for pleasure, rather than like Eileen Myles, whose embedded agonies are well-worth the wait. It’s so rewarding to get to follow Eileen’s train of thought in her poems, here, in her posts, etc.

That said, the only single interruption I can think of gives me a great deal of pleasure and relief: TS Eliot’s “In the room the women come and go/ talking of Michaelangelo.” Or however it’s punctuated. But that lives in the middle of a poem of inaction and agony. I’ll keep thinking of contemporary examples, but thanks for your questions.
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I’m curious why is it that you think those remnants or evidences of struggle need to be excised? Is that a personal decision, a sort of privacy (which would be understandable)? Or an aesthetic consideration? Are there poems you think are ruined by that sort of thing?

I often love to feel the thinking consciousness very present in the poem — and it’s funny we are writing this in Eileen’s thread, since she is a serious exhilarating master of this sort of inclusion — though I have actually always found one of the more famous examples of that sort of interjection , Bishop’s villanelle, One Art, with that “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster,” to be kind of annoying. I love her poems but that strikes me as a fake moment somehow, which I know is totally personal but still it’s a feeling I have.
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Mainly, I was relating a comment a friend of mine had made that struck me as not only interesting, but also related to Eileen’s story of seeing Schuyler so obviously going through the throes of changing consciousness. Which made me think of the realization my friend had, which in and of itself is a sort of poetic realization, a change in how one looks at the world, brought about by immersion in poetry. Which made me feel lucky to be a poet.
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I didn’t intend any offense by calling you Matt.

The “third” might be political, as they call it, poetry, perhaps, on which we had some active discussion here, springing from a post directly related to your anthology? It’s too bad, as I mentioned during the thread, that you didn’t come in on that, as I think it would have made things even more interesting. Eliot Weinberger, even, was here.

Sorry about the name thing.

Kent
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>He told me that for a while he had without realizing it been writing poems to explain things to others, but recently he has begun trying to write them to explain them to himself.

I never knew that there were two such “kinds” of poetry!

Kent
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I too look forward to Schuyler’s new work.

I love the idea of watching someone write poetry. When I finish writing a poem and read it over, I often find there are these palpable scars in the text at the moment I started watching myself write, fidget, agonize. Sometimes I love the way my self-consciousness works its way into the poem, but other times, I think anything that comes afterwards has to be excised/amputated and the poem must end there, even if it feels premature.

A
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Yesterday I was hanging out with a poet, we were looking at the Richard Avedon photographs in the SF Moma. He told me that for a while he had without realizing it been writing poems to explain things to others, but recently he has begun trying to write them to explain them to himself. It’s hard to know how something abstract like that relates to actual practice, but what he was saying really struck me as much better, very profound. Maybe the difference between the egotistical sublime and negative capability.

I am really looking forward to the publication of Other Flowers, the Schuyler poems retrieved from his papers.
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