Where Have All The Writers Gone?

Where have all the writers gone?
Where are all the poets?
Where is our Sandberg with his easy lines,
our Jeffers with his discontent,
our Frost playing tennis without a net
or with a net it doesn't matter?
Where is the greatness that defines us?
Where is our crying Ginsberg
our Bukowski with his rough blackbirds
and our Cohen of the Modern Miracle
(we're still waiting)?
Where is the voice of the internet age?
It'd better come soon.
Because it's lonely here with no one to read,
no modern sage to turn to
and I wonder how many people today
turn away from their windows
to their journals,
like me,
and write this down.

  9/10/2013

Lines 8/31/13

Do you know the language of the rain?
Can you hear the grammar of its tears
fallen from the sky like fallen angels
that wet the wasted landscape of the world
with their blood
where river song is frozen in the mud
and no wood sings?

Do you weep beneath the moon and tremble
as you stand before the tombstone of the earth
and leave dead flowers on its frozen grave
then wonder where to go?
The rain must know.

O People Of Time's Salutations (Again)

As I sat down with my laptop and got ready to do this blog post, I happened to glance at the dates on two poems that I had posted recently to my showcase. One was dated Winter, 1990 and the other was dated October, 2010. Twenty years. That's a long time to be doing anything. It's impossible to do something for that long without wondering why, without wondering what it is that drives me to do it in the first place. It's the sort of thing that gives me pause.

 

Because, after all this time, I still don't know. Sure there's the enjoyment aspect, but seriously I've spent more time playing video games than I have actually writing poetry. They come fast and hard and then they're gone. It's over - as fast as it came. So yeah, there's enjoyment, there's a mindstate thing going on there, but it's kind of short lived.

 

Whatever it is that drives me to do it in the first place comes from a much deeper place. It's driven by a much deeper need. And I don't know enough about myself to understand the depths of that drive, that need, or to understand anything about its origin. But twenty years is a long time to be scribbling lines of verse. It's long enough to say yeah, this may be the thing about my personality that is the most real, that transcends, so to speak, everything else - certainly transcending a desire to be recognized. People rarely read my poems. Over the years I could count the number of people who have shown a real, active interest in this side of me on one hand. And yet I persist. I do it anyway. I'm baffled by it and twenty years of doing it hasn't given me any more understanding of why I do it than I had when I first set down to write my first poem at the age of fifteen in sophomore English class. I feel like I should know more about this, but I don't. It's as elusive as consciousness itself. I know it's there, but when I try to look at it, it slips away, refusing to be seen. I guess poetry is just another form of meditation, mindful, in a sense, but not necessarily any more enlightened.

 

I consider the poem that follows to be one of the best that I have ever written. After twenty years I still feel that way. Some people may feel that as a poem it's just short of awful. Others may be kinder in their critique and say it's incomprehensible. Most people don't care either way. That's just the reality of being a poet these days. You're lucky if you can get anyone to read your stuff at all. People just don't read poetry anymore. But I'm not gonna go on a rant about that right now; I'll save that for a future blog post.

 

This poem isn't without its flaws. I'm aware of that, but I'd be hard pressed to point them out, having been so partial to this poem for so long now. Still I can't help but feel that this would be the worst sort of poem for me to subject to the poetry workshop process. Don't get me wrong; workshops have their place and they can do a world of good for anyone who's still trying to develop their own style, their own distinctive 'voice', as it were. But therein lies the rub. Doing poetry by consensus has the same problems as doing anything else by consensus. Sometimes it's too hard to go against the herd; sometimes the truth gets trampled. The voice you hear is not the voice of the writer anymore. It's the voice of the crowd and the individual voice gets lost in the din. And since the poet's individual voice, or style, is at the heart of what poetry is in the first place, that can be a fatal thing. I'll admit that I have never workshopped a poem. I just never saw the point. For fiction it makes more sense. I can see that. Fiction just seems more inherently objective that way. But poetry, being so damned subjective to begin with, just seems out of place in a consensus environment. And for a poem like the one that follows, there's a good chance that whatever emerged at the end of that process would be so different from what it started out as that it would be virtually unrecognizable. There are poems I have written in the past that might benefit from that - possibly - but not this one. The sense of loss would be, for me anyway, unbearably palpable.

 

Still, the gist of this poem isn't really that hard to grasp with a little exposition. I'll admit that, standing on its own, it doesn't have a good chance of being understood at all. Some poets feel that a poem should be able to stand on its own - or not at all, that poets shouldn't talk about their work. I don't feel that way, at least not anymore. Talking about the stuff I've written is very satisfying for me these days. And if that makes my poems a little easier to understand then hey, I'm all for it.

 

The basic idea in this poem is that the sea is a metaphor for life itself. Everything the sea produces - in this case the shells it leaves on the shore - is just one more manifestation of that. The shells are like living things, or the tales they tell, and the poem feels dream like this way. It's a dream of life, of bearing witness to all that life produces.

 

They say that when you hold a conch to your hear you can hear the sound of the ocean. I play with this idea a bit. With the ocean as a metaphor for life, holding the conch to your ear allows you to replay its manifestations and see them in the mind's eye. The speaker in this poem is bearing witness to the different kinds of people the sea of life produces, in all their different phases - the young, the old, the scholars and the working class. That's what this poem is - a contemplation and a celebration of humanity and the life-source that produces them and ultimately reclaims them.

 

I did a lot of different things with language in this poem; I achieved something stylistically that I have never been able to reproduce since. That might be why I like it so much. I haven't been able to write another poem like it. It's one of the earliest prose poems I ever wrote and not the last.  A prose poem is a poem that's written in sentences and paragraphs without line breaks and there are poets out there who don't understand that concept I guess. I like prose poems a lot. I've tried reworking this poem, breaking the lines up, but something gets lost in the process. It was born as a prose poem and it will die as a prose poem. But the lines have a rhythm to them that jumps out at me when I read them. It's almost like the poem wants to be more than mere prose, but I'm not sure what that is. Then there's a lot of alliteration and, occassionally, what I think of as word-bending - where a noun becomes a verb or an adjective, where parts of speech are just suggestions, not written in stone. I love the freedom that poetry gives me to do this. It's almost like poems come from so deep within the unconscious that language is still learning how to exist, where the words continually break themselves and reform, like the frothy waves of the sea itself. It's a place where mind is life and life is mind, where each perpetually creates the other. This poem is dreamlike in that sense. In many ways it is the dream of poetry itself, the dream of life. I don't always know why I write poetry, but when I re-read poems like this, I come closer. After twenty years that may be as close as I can get. Who knows - it might even be enough.

- Jon-Paul Smith

- January 7, 2011

 

 

 

O People Of Time's Salutations

O People of time’s salutations, my love is gathering seashells by that hilled windy gathering place the sea (like dim worlds vexed with sound in the stuck conch, to undo this day the scaly wrongs that scuttle in the soul’s sea); for gull-winged griefs that drop their vowels on spat hills of light, my love is gathering portents like sea-made money for the truths found their in untruth, and hearing them there, I see them there:

Summer folk that come from cold to these great gathering hills and find one breasted ounce of ocean silver to keep like crying know that taut pants cringing came, the color of kisses, scattered on the sand grains like arms and legs. O People of time’s salutations, this shell and ear will bray there for the weeped hills that leaving love labored.

Folk of autumn come from fear, wracked by youth, grow old there where the hills recede — gather dust of water to glow the sun over with knowing that came too late. Sad gone days lean to and fro in the salutating tide that tugs the land for lack of care. O People of time’s salutations, this conch and ear will hear them scratch as the days go out to sea.

The morning folk that come from shadow gather wand watered proverbs in the still light. Great hills for these mad people who froth like waves for the sayings of ages. O People of time’s salutations, though eternities implode like new suns in their slow gatherings, shell and breath can not blow them out beyond sound’s ill reach where the sea goes endlessly rocking and mocking their finitudes.

The folk of evening come from labor, their wasted souls on hill and sullied waves dropped like shells in wrong places. Muscles matted on sanddollar days yield no virtue’s wages. Work is a shark’s tooth for the weary. O People of time’s salutations, shell and ear will hear them breathe though the sun going down can not.

Shell and ear for these splay sounds that daunt and dabble (by a sea of hilly days go on). But to pity and praise this great endeavour, my love is seashell gathering by that same great sea while the waves go pithily out on this hill and monied water like thoughts and implications. O People of time’s salutations, this conch and ear will trumpet eternities in the long-winded tides that walk there.

               - Spring, 1990

Lines For Lily (I)

My little girl is like a shark.

The world she lives in

is a series of exploratory bites.

She is playing in the grassmind

putting blades of sunshine in her mouth.

Smiling, serene,

she makes a wrinkled face for the world,

pulling at the page

as Daddy writes this down.

        - 3/11/2013

Succubus, 4 A.M.

Daughter of pain, child of the hole
that has no bottom, she comes into the room
fresh from the maggot stew of long damnation
to steal the mystic breath in foul embrace
no man resists. Her hair is red and long,
her breasts they droop, her lips are full, her tongue
travels the lusty contour of a promise
divinely wrong. Her hips are full and wide.
The space between her legs is warm, slick, wet
with the stink of slime that sends good men to hell,
demolishing aspiration.

                      - March 8, 2013