If I think of how blurry it was at the time. Publishing in the same magazines for a while, a language poet might try and have sex with you and try and make you a language poet girl. But actually once there was a magazine there really wasn’t a feeling of openness. I was never asked to write and I wasn’t interested in theory and that seemed to be key though I’ve also heard in retrospect that what passed for theory in language magazine was often pretty lame but I wouldn’t have know the difference at the time.

I think the biggest difference is I was queer and really wanted to write about it. If you look today in the piano bar chronicles about language writing there really isn’t much sex. And they were having sex. They were young. They had to be. They just didn’t like writing about it and for me, aesthetically that is a problem. There was a whole revolution in San Francisco which created New Narrative Writing which was I think about people on the poetry scene wanting to be engaged with excess and sex and narrative particularly as AIDS reared its head – I have to ask where is the great language poem about AIDS, how could you watch so many people die and not write about it? I’ve always thought of AIDS as the Vietnam of my generation. A war needs its poets and we were absolutely there. John Ashbery did it in his John Ashbery way. And I think Language writing did not see that as its job. For that alone I have to stand in resistance to thinking of Language writing as what happened in poetry in the seventies and eighties.

To advance our poetics we have to go back. I think I’m allowed to say this because these poets are my friends (or they were) and this is what we do right, a discourse, and I’m trying to make room for other histories as we’re wallpapering the past we have to know there were many more than one. The explanation isn’t happening here. And also despite the fact that this conference is taking place in the academy I think we also must know that as artists we have to always take the academy with a grain of salt. It’s a resource, it’s a workplace, it’s many things. It’s a patron. It’s something we’re in cahoots with. But it can’t be the ground of the poetry world. It’s not in here.

When I taught in San Diego I noticed that the excitement for a writer’s work was at its peak at the hiring stage. Like when you were being eaten. Once one became part of the faculty it became clear that poets were not as trustworthy as scholars. This puts a poet at a dilemma. You realize you have signed on for an unholy marriage. Some poets are able to take advantage of what the academy offers. I found there was an insidiousness to being someplace that undermined you daily by its refusal to treat you as an equal. Your work was not research. Your grades were inflated. Your students’ texts were impossible to read. These pronouncements were delivered with great huffiness like poetry was a stumbling block to them, an affront to their experience of knowledge. Our outsiderness was never an enticement, or rarely. We were most visible when we received rewards. We put our paws or our genitals out and were lauded. For those for whom it was, we became friends. Mostly though it was like one applying for a grant, to be a poet in the academy I always felt I was in the position to need to prove my love. It could not be taken for granted. It had to be demonstrated again and again. Finally I realized we were baby-sitters keeping the numbers up for the department. Because writing as a major was popular. That’s why we were there. To support their jobs.

I mention this because approval by this same academy is a specious measuring tool for poetry. Work that “looks like” work or can be demonstrated as being “work” to academics eyes will fly. And that’s been one of language writing’s main powers since day one; it’s capacity to sell itself to the academy. And now Jorie Graham is coming around, and who else is liking us now. Actually I think of myself as not not a language poet. It’s a new negative space and I wonder who would like to come gather around…..But seriously folks is enthusiastic reception from the academy and its poetry stars our criteria for success. Mission Accomplished.

I prefer a mess.

Not a flarf mess or a conceptual mess. I think poetry history is always messier than that and if you only studied poetry with Heather McHugh or Charles or Kenny or Eileen you will probably be missing a lot. We tend to over-believe our filters. And a poet in the academy is a filter.

I don’t know about Heather, well yes I do. She is not a genius. I have written about it. I can tell you exactly why. I sort of thought Rae would get a MacArthur this year. Didn’t you feel it. So perhaps in some worlds language poetry is still a coming thing, not the blunderbuss of “us,” whichever one is out there somewhere hard at work keeping the fringes down. But I say the fringes, and their tiny adjustments is where poetry’s live edge is. Not in here.

What about feminism. I’m so sick of the word. Aren’t you?  Don’t we ever just get to be. To my fellow females, I’m bushed. Do we have to talk about poetry here? Good I won’t. When I see Details magazine leering that porn is the new Sex Ed and learn that that is pretty literally true I feel scared. Boys (and girls) have more immediate access to porn at this time than at any other time in history. The access is only growing. There’s no violent sex act you can’t see with a click. The web is furnishing what would have been previously unimaginable could be out there for a boy of 13 or 17. Or a girl. But there’s no porn for girls. It’s aimed at a male audience and the come shot is aimed at her face. And that’s what he gets. We’re writing poetry and advancing feminist poetics at a time when girls grow up with less access to interiority, less ability to imagine their own bodies and what they might want than ever before. She is expected to get in position. The media purports what she is and was. I love Cathy Wagoner’s new book My Job suggesting at various points that she could be writing a sex manual for adolescent girls. That’s the kind of advancement of feminist poetics I endorse. All kinds of private revolutions for the female body and mind. The brave and the playful, the imaginative men can come. I would advocate a poetry full of characters like CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank who delivers mad obscene haiku healing yes I said it healing in 137 tiny doses over eleven years, unstoppable poetry that hurts and turns a mirror to pain and risks being viewed as the problem when CA you’re the cure. Poems that can be sung, that step outside of the reading room, into the studio, poems that design themselves into collective projects so people can see what poets do, poets climbing up a mountain, talking among themselves and making a film about it, working publicly against poisoning our water, slicing the tops off our mountains, extracting gas from under the ground at what cost. Poets running for small local offices, women fighting to put sex education back in the schools, sex in our poems, poems in our songs, time in our lives, time to lose, to lie on the mat to make tiny adjustments, to live. To live long as we’ve got.

I’ve been mostly thinking about the earth these days, mostly that she’s a girl, that she’s a poet and one in great danger. I decided not eat red meat, do that for a while. No ice on the planet in 2013. What should we do. Start a school or shut up? No.

I have a bunch of things I’ve been reflecting on lately and I wonder what kind of keynote they’ll make. Generally I’m happiest with the off the cuff remarks which are so often planned. I have a number of things and I’ll jot them on an index card which seems a blank postcard to myself perfect little luggage with several of these I sit down and then the utter formality of the poetry world always feeds me. I feel like a predator.

The formal aspect of our world is never the party any of us came for. I’ve been trained through performance and an aspect of my private life to speak extemporaneously (which is actually the thing that is most repressed in the confererence settings except for the person who is getting to speak which is why not getting invited makes us mad – uninvited you’re squashed back down into the public silence of the gathering) and we all teach that way don’t we – a lot. You can always recognize a person who teaches by their unabashed capacity to talk to themselves in front of others – for hours.  There’s a kind of oblivious surface they excrete. It’s palpable, you can feel it. Of course you can never more feel it with a high school teacher but people who teach poetry in college are really good at blah blah blah. But somehow when we give papers or keynotes or panels we want to get it right nail it so we tend to write it down.

Jim Carroll just died which is one thing on my mind. He was an exceptional poet performer and he had one trick which I’ve thought about for years which was to look up from the text he was reading from and spontaneously fill you in a little more. To explore in some detail what he had been reading about. It made the audience cheer that they had come because Jim live gave even more than Jim on the page. But if you happily bought his  book you would discover that Jim was merely delivering direct to the audience a part of the text but acting as if it were off the cuff. He was spontaneously doing himself. He never said it; it was all delivered in tone. There’s a kind of genius in this, to almost appropriate your own work to your own ends, it’s a joke that you rope the audience into. It’s a con.

Patti Smith, is another poet performer who started hanging around in the late sixties in New York and hit her public stride in the mid seventies. Patti would organize the chaos of her patter into an art. If you listen to her early recordings you’ll hear her babbling about Arthur Rimbaud or Gerard De Nerval and then the babble becomes percussive which releases the poem that is essentially a chant and then it was just bringing the band in but they were already there. She created room for them in the poem. And Patti always came with an entourage to her early performances and her friends would chat with her onstage and she sounded and looked scared and that look evoked a kind of protective fan ship from the crowd both her friends and everyone else. It was Patti’s vulnerability when she performed that was her performance’s single most compelling note. It was a collective inside. It was breathing. She was Patti to an audience of Patti’s somehow. One felt the triumph of us in her earliest performances. Like Yoga for losers.

I’m always thinking another name for poetry would help out at this point and also another name for feminism. Isn’t that the impulse to make schools. I’m hoping in this conference someone will explain it to me. I mean if you’re using something everybody already knows (Language, Conceptual) and putting things in it that everybody already does then I think it’s a store, not a school. Maybe even a chain. It contributes to the history of branding not aesthetics. Poetry just seems like a handful of things and the spark part is how they are connected. I’d like to write about that spark but maybe that is what I’m doing. I’ve been noticing lately after taking yoga classes erratically for about ten years and mostly feeling rage through them as the person is telling me how to breathe and move and I’m freaked out by the intimacy and my inability to pay attention and then how rigid I am in some places. I’m stuck. The teacher gives you little tips. You’re doing something where you hold your knees to your chest and she advises that you stretch your back out and put your tailbone on the floor or spread your shoulders feel it open your chest. These are the things I rarely hear in the present maybe in about one class in ten but years later doing the stretch on my own on the floor the idea comes unbidden and the posture changes and I swiftly move to the next.

When we do a poetry reading we act as if we are unaware of the silence between the poems or that we never expected it would be there when we know perfectly well how long each poem is and when we are moving from one to the next especially if you look at all the post its flapping out of your book. You knew you’d be standing there drinking water leaving us awkward and thirsty. I love that Jim and Patti made those synapses be the life of the show. Jim’s interruptions of the text itself made the moments in between texts be invisible. We know he is our friend. He has opened up to us now and so we’re comfortable sitting here waiting together in time till Jim sees what’s next. I remember that he was a bartender’s son. He knew you were watching.

I remember watching Robert Pinsky give a reading many years ago; pre poet Laureate Pinsky and he wore a beautiful striped shirt that he read a poem about. His entire delivery was smug and well honed; each little anecdote between the poems was planned and had obviously been work shopped through multiple test audiences to see what pleased us and what we could stand. This was not a spontaneous poet. Not even trying to look that way. Tight as a bandbox, kind of a hale and hearty fellow for librarians I thought. He was reading with a friend of mine. He’s horrible I whispered and she got mad that I would say this while he was in the room. But the room was where I was offended. The interregnum remarks of the poet tell us whom he or she is speaking to. If you are uncomfortable with their description of reality you don’t have to stay. They inform us of the nature of the whole production. Is this an intellectual exercise, is entertainment part of it now, maybe it will be, was it ever. Often people think ‘I hate poetry’ in response to these moments. It may be an appropriate response. But poets are the people who enjoy passing through these changes. Again I say Yoga for Losers.

In my Iceland book one of the things I say all the time when I read from it is that its one of the most lesbian books of art writing that doesn’t call itself that. I mean the book was written in bits and pieces over the years assembled I think much like a poetry reading. A reading I think considers the effect of the last piece listens and drops another one into that opening that will address or attenuate or alter the affect that continues to rumble in the reader and the audience’s minds and bodies. It’s an accumulation of things. Yoga for losers, so to speak. I say the lesbian thing because I’m continually (since I wrote the pieces separately) announcing my lesbianity in individual pieces because it was always an opportunity in public to stick that word in the unlikely place in the world when I’m writing an art review or a personal column or an essay. I kept seizing this opportunity to out myself and now I have the problem of putting these pieces together and wondering if I’ve said the word lesbian thirty-eight times or two hundred and fifty times or ninety-seven.  Then I realize I can search and I have. I think it’s similar with the phrase language poet. (More tomorrow….)

It means drug though “the word in Greek famously refused to designate whether poison or cure.” It’s also variously described as “a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color and paint.”  She knocks about trying to link it to love, to fucking. But it doesn’t stick. She brings up the possibility that instead like beauty, Pharmikon radiates. It does not stay still. And finally the written word is called Pharmikon.

come down when it fell. I headed over to Cathy’s where I was staying and I had the problem of arriving at her house and not wanting to say I’m sick since I had never stayed with them before. But once I hit the bed I knew it was a long fall and I was pretty much there for twenty-four hours straight.

My friends were kind considering they were going to Hawaii the next day and it would ruin everything if I brought germs into their house. By Tuesday I was semi-frisky, hopping around LA making all the dates and meetings I’d planned. I even went into a studio with Japanther and recorded three poems. The altered state I had been in was a plus cause they basically said I could record whatever I wanted and Ian played me a recorded song with plenty of fast guitar and some vocals and pointed to one area both on the computer screen and in time and said I thought maybe if you could go in there and then there were some bells and it slowed down and you could read even slower in there. So I jumped in late in one fairly new poem with a lyric: “I live in a terminal/and so do you” and it didn’t so much sound like a song as be an open moment somehow and the trickiest part was not trying to sound like a punk talking fast. Use your regular voice he kept telling me and we recorded the same two or three poems over and over again and it was kind of amazing like going to the bathroom in front of everyone since I kept stepping out of the recording room and someone would say do it again, or you went up on this line, or I could hear you turning papers.

Everyone had a lot of time and was listening really close. When it was over I ate food that everyone was eating that Matt dished out and felt like part of the scene. It was nice. Now I had a couple of hours to kill and was afraid to return to Cathy and Julie’s house as the germ bearer but I did and it was brief and it was possible Cathy was hiding from my sickness because I never saw her again. For days I’ve wanted to see the Keats film. I went to his room in Rome in 1986, the room where he died and looked at the little orange flowers on the ceiling that were probably the last thing he looked at. I love looking at the last thing. Rome is full of them.

Finally I was returning the rental car and in the airport and going home finally though I would be sick for many more days. I read the New York Times while I waited, normally a very grounding routine and first I noticed in the paper that one group of businessmen and world leaders looked like puppets. I just couldn’t see these as real people and that thought was astonishing. But then I was looking at another group a few pages later and the sensation struck me again that these were not real people, but odd somehow. Like toy people. And I touched my head and it seemed I had a fever and the visions I were having were not The New York Times but were me gently hallucinating.

He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.

Jim had a rock star moment too (I watched him singing “people who died” on you tube last night and I thought he looked maybe uncomfortable) and he was a better than fair monologist which he was doing and everyone was doing somewhat in the time that we toured. Lila Wallace sponsored the tour and the idea was that a famous poet and a younger or less famous poet would go out there together and the pleasure of doing this with Jim far out shadowed any feeling that I should be he who had such a different life from mine.

I had met him already a few times before our tour which is not to say the two of us were in some bus together. We met in city to city, from gig to gig. We read together a bunch of times was it. In San Francisco where I had read many times before and usually to mostly gay audiences I discovered that there was a massive straight scene there too. Who knew. Jim brought them out. So definitely some nights I felt a little buried by the scene he drew though other nights I felt I was “the winner” but Jim always read longer, that was one of the hallmarks of a star, to be comfortable with that. To know that people expected it. He was sweet. I mean he was obviously sharp too. But the sweetness wasn’t a performance it was true. And it’s just a great gift to give five or ten readings with another writer if you admire their work. Which I did. I kind of remember him getting on his knees in some reading at St. Mark’s Church and in that poem he said he was asking permission.

He was very tall. He kind of merged a catholic thrill and a rock n roll thrill and a poet thrill all in one shameless gesture. On our tour Jim had a very neat trick which it took me a while to uncover which was that he would be reading from some book that he had read from many times and suddenly he would look up and tell us some other detail about the same subject. It was so fresh these moments of pure performance when something simply occurred to him and he decided to share it. But when I bought the book I discovered that THOSE LINES WERE IN THERE! He simply delivered them as if they were impromptu and returned to the text with another grade of attention in place now and the reading was refreshed. A device like that explained his staying power. Still at first I struggled with whether this gesture was false or not. I was wanting to be pure. It was like watching anyone reading the same poem again and again. Or on other occasions I heard Jim tell the same story again in order to set up a poem.

There was a sense I finally got from him that this was a job and he had the chops to do it well. He did it with such ease. He did it like it was raw. Which was an amazing gift. I stepped into his wake for a few minutes this evening and on the way a group of us had wondered if he had any family. They’re Irish I suggested. How could he not have siblings. A bald middle-aged man almost magically introduced himself to us then as Jim’s brother. Though you’d never know it he laughed seeing his own grey suit and bright tie. We told him we were poets and the man said he never had any difficulty imagining Jim as a writer. But the rock and roll stuff seemed wrong. He was an altar boy you know and Jim would be shaking up on the altar. He didn’t like it at all being up there. And that’s what I saw. In the music he look kind of exposed.

The act of performing writing is quiet, after all. It’s very private in a way. No matter’s who’s out there. And the jokes or agreements we might have with ourselves about what’s real and what’s performed we keep to ourselves finally. He was great poet and performing artist and the difference between the two only Jim knew.

It was at a moment when everyone knew electricity could make a frog legs kick so why not this pile of meat think and run and kill. All sorts of things happen in this short novel that lots of people read in high school and I have read it for an extraneous research purpose but the great stray accomplishment of being a poet is always doing the right thing for the wrong reason. It’s like there’s always a lot of food falling off the plate of the apparent purpose and that feeds poetry quite often, that gutter, those scraps. Poetry is a hungry dog. The monster’s has gotten a lot of work already. Has appeared in two poems by now. Plus the vocabulary of the 19^th c. feigning to be the 18^th fills me with joy.

The dead for example are said to possess ‘manes,’ but what manes are in this context are the spirits of the dead. Isn’t that wildly suggestive when you think of hair. I think the monster’s hair may have been mentioned once or twice and it was wild and raggedy like the weather of the book but mostly I was moved by the mention of the monster’s heart. His feelings. It is after all a romantic book. Written by a woman. The monster upon his birth was scorned. His master pretty much screamed when he was born (not what he had in mind?) and was left to his own devices immediately upon this not so much birth, but more rightly his invention, his revival perhaps if the parts of many people coming back to life could be thought of as a single occasion, a party more or less. A legal term.

So the monster had desires as a party might for community and tenderness, a shared meal around the fire. The monster learned to acquire language through peeping from the outside of a house into the inner sanctum – by observing the sufferings and sweetness of a strife-ridden family. Who like the monster’s father also howled in disgust and terror when my man showed up, the monster.

It is so interesting that the creature is only known by the name of his creator, being either book or son. You wouldn’t have thought for a moment of anything so simple as daughter. Who would make that. Later we saw Viktor Frankenstein momentarily get the parts in order to make the monster a wife but it was too much to bear so he tore the second creature to bits and dumped them into the sea. The monster, alone till the end, except in mutual hatred with his dad, referred to himself sorrowfully at the end as an abortion. How old is that word, an unutterable one at this point in time.

Frankenstein as a book is all bad vibe.

Yet the monster’s feelings were way more pithy than his master’s — whose life he was dying and succeeded in the end to destroy. I don’t know, I just thought the monster’s loneliness seemed natural and normal. The novel is one of those enormous cultural accidents where the wrong thing said in the right way is always coming alive again and again and is the best definition of classic. My man, Mary, hello!

I’m trying to cure myself of the blogging late in the month syndrome PARTICULARLY because this month is my last month of blogging. To get to the quick of it I think well why am I not blogging now. Well because I have a new book and I’m obsessed in a way that figures directly on that reality so I’m not blogging directly on my new book so I’m not blogging. But that’s crazy because I think one intimate aspect of blogging is figuring out how to write about what you are doing. I just had my book party. How was it? Good! I’ve thought before about an anthology I don’t want to edit called TOUR in which poets and writers but I think I prefer it be all poets contribute their tour stories. I love this idea. I also love the idea of blogging on every aspect of a poet’s career, creating kind of an encyclopedia of what one of our careers is. I’ll do the book party right now. I just received a piece of mail from Nathan who was at the party and I kind of gasped at how quickly his mail got to me – two days from event to event. Since New York mail has been pretty bad and I am the last person to say this in print or disparage the US postal service because I am a DAP (daughter of an American Postal worker) I am happy to report on its goodness. The goodness also reflects on time passing –two days since the party. Time to report. People who weren’t there say how was your party. I say this: it was intimate in pace. It’s a thrilling detail I’ll share. The party took place at ArtBook@x which is a temporary bookstore project of DAP – coincidence! It’s true, this DAP means Distributed Art Publishers. They have an office and have also had a bookstore or do at PS1 but in the last year they have done the coolest thing which is to have book parties in temporary spaces – a little boutique in the east village will in the evening move the clothes racks aside and DAP will roll the bookshelves in and the party begins. The party ends, they roll the shelves out. And now the project has grown big. They rolled the bookstore itself in for year. It was Sept. 10^th, a Thursday night in Chelsea which felt like the opening night of the art world and the crowds as I walk slowly towards my death (the party) reminded me as they always do of day of the locusts in which all the characteristics of humans are quickly gone and it seems to chomp on itself the organism of the crowd. Quickly I stepped in to the somewhat cavernous garage-like space of the store. The doors to the street remained wide open throughout the two hours of the party and I greeted Skuta and Rick and err the woman taking the pictures and then friends began to trickle in. They seemed a little scarce at first and I resisted the impulse to ask them if this was okay. The idea had been that people were going to many other parties in Chelsea so this would be one of them for them. I don’t know if it really worked that way. Maybe. A little. Mostly it was like people were coming in from the rain. They would kind of shudder about “out there” cause it was a monstrous crowd that night. It had just gotten cold that day. Fall had truly begun. So everyone commented on the weather too. Do I have anything else to say? Yes, my point. Which was that the space was so big and people came in so slow actually really heating up towards the end so that I was actually able to talk to everyone. I thought is it okay that there’s really a lot of room here for everyone. People seemed relieved by this uncrowded event. And somehow in the 8:15 830-ish range where a little tiny reading moment was supposed to occur there was a nice crowd, a moderate but a good crowd of people I knew and other people I knew had already come and gone apologizing because they couldn’t stay for the reading part and I have received emails to that effect. Every event these days is surrounded by messages of all sorts. I have a note from Maureen explaining that she couldn’t come at all and I will respond accordingly on facebook. Quick can operate in support of slow. So I’m just saying that by the time Jeremy and Chris introduced me and said things I was finally up on that mysterious round stage that I couldn’t imagine earlier and the room felt like some odd seminar of friendship or some cult or a reading but more like being a weatherman of this particular small storm to say that I was so glad you came and then I felt it was over already the whole rest of the tour I just have to do it now, get on the plane and get off, read the book but the party is the part you have with your friends like a christening or a baz mitzvah and it just kind of swelled and was done. Across the room I saw at least one person who didn’t say hello. I thought well that’s odd or maybe not. It happened slow everything and then it was quick. And then it was done.

 Manhattan is one of the great places in the world to ride a bicycle and for instance tonight it was Myra’s birthday so she and Chana, her girlfriend, and I rode to Film Forum and then to the East Village for bubble tea. It was very social and just beautiful out tonight. But sometimes a bicycle is an interruption and you ride it somewhere to meet someone

but afterwards do you want to walk with them with your bike in crowded weekend sidewalks stopping and starting and just having an extra body along when you want to feel intimate. It’s a decision you weigh – whether to leave your bike in Chelsea or Chinatown or on 10^th St. all night or not. There are seasons in bike thievery – entire decades, the 80s for instance when to own a bike was to be endlessly buying a new one. And moral questions about whether it was okay to buy a hot bike when you had lost so many. Weren’t you just buying your own bike back after all so THAT’S okay, right? It’s calmer out there now so what generally happens is a bicycle hangover. The next day I run out of my apartment ready jump on my bike cause I’m late and it’s not there. It’s at Broadway/Lafayette. You are thinking she lost her bike but I didn’t. I instead walked up Houston Street on such a gorgeous sunny day so beautiful you could cry. I need fruit I thought for this walk and the guy who sells fruit on 1^st and 1^st was there and I bought figs and pears. Figs & Pears! That sounds like a poem title. And up the street, penless, I thought about what might go into this poem. Lines tearing out from all angles, about shirts, and an ending came to me but I knew I would never remember that but the jounce of the day seemed likely to hold many of the lines and I rode home swiftly weighing whether I dare do one errand before I got home wondering if that would be the disintegration of the poem or if I simply had it and it would go on until I was ready. I decided to play it safe and I parked and I saw John. I’ve lived in my building intermittently for 32 years, longer than the house I grew up in which was 18. That’s really scary only nine years did I live anywhere else. Hi John. There’s a cadre of us who have lived in my building for many many years. People like us live all over Manhattan and you could say we like to talk. Most of the ones in my building are gay men and they feel like brothers. John said hello back. The day was so great. How are you? Why was I playing it wild. He could only answer. Could he ever. John began and I could have said I left something burning upstairs, I’m so sorry I have to go to the bathroom, I’m late. Maybe it was the look in his eye that he really needed to tell someone the thing he was telling me. Plus I think to some extent the poem you need to protect is already not a poem anymore, is already gone. Maybe this poem was just glorious feeling, a great day to put a poem in, but not a poem at all. I slapped some lines down on an index card, but they weren’t even friends. I now have the vaguest thought to take a very deliberate walk each day not so much to reproduce the poem, but to make failure into a kind of friend and see what she will give if I meet her regular. 

I was having an exchange online with a friend about a book of essays I just published and in response to him saying he was enjoying reading it I gave a short essay in reply about my suffering. How utterly hard this book was . . . not so much to write but to put together. It was a monster. Every time I read publicly from this book I make similar allusions to the martyrdom of the process. It’s a book from of lot of moments, I mean like 80s and 90s and ought’s thus it’s also a lot of formats and decisions and untold agony throughout. When I teach one of the things I generally tell students is that often things that feel utterly great when you are writing them prove to be terrible later on whereas things that I have slogged through with a thick burden of self loathing and ill feeling, bad weather and existential humidity manage to yield something really great – not always but often enough to think there is no relationship between how a piece of writing turns out as opposed to how it feels to write it. Writing might feel bad or good but that doesn’t mean it’s good or bad writing. Weird, right.  The reason I mentioned Jimmy is often think about the great poet James Schuyler who I had the good fortune to work for a while in the late seventies and eventually we became friends. I spent a lot of real time with him in his room in the Chelsea because of the nature of my job. He struggled with mental illness for a big part of his adult life and he was nearing another bout it seemed one autumn afternoon in New York. In the midst of it he was writing a poem. He was wearing a dark red orange flannel shirt and he was sitting at a table by the French windows that faced 23^rd St. and I was aghast because in my time of knowing him I had never observed him writing one though I sometimes arrived right after and he showed it to me. This time he was in the throes of writing it and I knew he was very agitated and he seemed like I said very close to having a nervous breakdown. It was that thing of knowing a person to the extent that you can feel their vibe and his was thick with something. Later when I saw the poem he had been writing it seems exquisitely calm, meditative and peaceful even. I wondered if the act of the writing a poem was a kind of balancing for him. Creating a world that would hold the agitation he was feeling even as he was passing through it.