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this is not new but it is relevant to what I am doing and still working toward. Writing that is free of its months and mouths ~ .
“…he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem, that is, a composition…” John Milton, An Apology
Poetry is a way of living – Tristan Tzara 1932
Other horrible labourers /workers will come – Arthur Rimbaud 1871
Socrates’ Pharmacy – Notes on Plato
Plato’s – Or no, wasn’t that Socrates’ Pharmacy? A poet speaks to you, Damon. One who writes to you always from the place of no speak. Each time I read and write I write back from the place in myself, the space of activity called Poet – Socrates thinks poets are possessed and not masters. Therefore, Lorca’s duende and we return to the inspired “Lunatic, lover and poet” of Shakespeare and company. There are no masters of imaginative writing and creative writing is hokum, smoke and mirrors…the poet is a magician, master of magic (again Rimbaud). Crispin cutters on the seas (of his own desire – not a minor character, or a Minor Milton as in Bloom – but a tripper, a voyageur, an approximate man taddling his way through his own troped language myth). This idea of being taken over from an outside force fits in with the late Jack Spicer’s ideas about poetry (and those of the previous centuries i.e. Blake, Yeats, Milton etc. Ted Hughes essay on the metric and poetry, or his Dancer before God. In the latter he discusses Eliot’s departure from the Outside of Yeats and the turn to inwardness. In this sensewayward inwardness and subjectivity as we know it is transcendence internalized and psychologized. Isn’t this Husserl’s phenomenological ego and transcendental ego dualism – I do believe it is). Poetry has its origins in the Outside and not the inside of the poet’s psychology, his head, or whatever other existential psychological personal contextual situation one might conjure up.One thinks of Vico, and not the weak internal readers of psychology. Yes, to the inner but only as related to the map of the outer, the ramps of the self reaching across the world, Shakespeare, Marlowe. Each poet then is possessed by a god, the god Apollo, or whatever Other force one wants to attribute to the energy of poetry. I mean other in the sense that something ‘enters’ something outside of the dualities of rational and irrational, something simple and not complicated at all, but it is like magic. One works for a life to make one simple poem. The poem might end up being 12 books but it is the poem – the poem of a life, or the one “long” poem Shelley and O’Hara spoke about.
But it is definitely not an inside source, but an Outside, something that takes over the rational faculties and writes the poet (the verb “writes” is used transitively). So there is no mastery involved. Artaud’s words: no more masterpieces… As in
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