blah blah-ologist

it interests me nearly that van gogh could know the potato eaters for a masterpiece. (because everything i hear, see, read, taste, smell or touch--everything i experience, in fact, except for pain--gets processed through me at an alarming rate--i'm not bragging; it is alarming; i continuously have to go back for obscure pieces of my comprehensions that i didn't realize i'd absorbed in order to get to where i've got, consequentially my ratiocination is not so much full of holes as just soaked, you know? jumbled? doing something quickly doesn't entail doing it well. anyway, because of this, finding out about van gogh means something to me, and i recognize that it's something not necessarily intrinsic to van gogh. like janie with her meshes, i'm checking it out.)

i realize that a lot--most--of the things that are on this blog are crap. they aren't always unnecessary crap, i guess, but they lack dimension. i write them because i think someone would like to see them, or because they relieve a piece of consciousness that sits heavier than a denny's meal on my insides (i do like denny's; i just don't like how it makes me feel). poetry's hard because it's like singing: i have to superintend the feeling. the process is by no means obvious. and every once in a while i get it, but most of the time i fuck it up.

my point is thus: i'm no van gogh, but i know--i'm fairly sure--that the "dream leaven and dream" poems are, not good, but the best i've done thus far. it's quite possible they're not publishable. they don't make any sense; they're overly self-involved; the words in them are like stones in a field under the jackhammer (but, you know, less good than that would imply). hopefully they pass the point of comprehension without being incomprehendable. what they mean is a flavor, a texture, something past the point of "meaning," right? but they're furry, like a lollipop in a couch. they're improper. they're not good. they're too personal--they're like laura riding's in that sense.

i have no idea, in short, how to quantify the fact that i believe in them more than i do in other stuff i've done. even ed wood, even that "facets IV," which i like alot, is just goofing around. i believe in "facets V," but you can't have that without the first 4, and 1 and 2 are playthings, and 3 is overly, stuffily portentous.

i did some poems before i came on here, after i'd...gotten mused, i guess (did you know that v has a wonderful plan for your life?), and some of those were good. but i abandoned them because i thought that they were too traditional. can you stand it? of course nothing exists in a vacuum. millions of people more talented than i have things to say. if i can't run with the curve, i'd probably best get out the kitchen (way to mix a metaphor).

i don't know. i just don't know. (i'll have to take it up with my sales manager). h.d. meant every word of "helen of egypt." but niedecker might not have meant every word of her thomas jefferson poems, and those are just as beautiful.

the point is, it's okay if my poems are unacceptable. i'm not saying that's what makes them great, but i'm taking leave to believe in them--only a select few, however--despite probably-deserved rejection. does that make any sense? maybe i only believe in the state of mind i was in while writing them? self-doubt, with bells on, ladies and gentlemen.