In a message dated 97-12-22 19:31:30 EST, [log in to unmask]
writes:

> Funny, people are always surprised when I respond to anything with clarity.

My surprise was due to the fact that so often the world responds to me in a
muddle, to the point of my suspecting my own ability, not yours. Possibly I
should have used the word "delight".

>  So the question remains, was the joke on me, but aimed by the gods of
>  dis-course. Was the whole thing a cosmic setup? It certainly led into
>  itself, within the context of what I was responding to what I thought
>  that you had written.

I thought the joke was on me. The response to what I had copied and pulled
from context was exact and specific to an inquiry that mattered to me, though
I don't think I was as conscious of how important the inquiry was until I had
received the response. There was no joke intended, and there was no deliberate
fishing expedition... it was more in line with throwing a stone in the local
fire-pond and awakening a Leviathan. A most welcome adventure. But no intent
of a ruse on my part.

>  Or is the joke that, for some of us either/neither les philosophes or G & E
>  are opaque. Was I arguing with a phantom, corporeal to me, but only
>  available to you, Ken, as an archetype of a form of impenetrable discourse.

The discourse was not for me impenetrable, and it was the sharing of the
clarity that delighted. Often I find everything feels incorporeal and as a
phantom. G & E is intended to be opaque, though anyone having to excessively
use a dictionary will probably say it is laborious. Then again, do intentions
have any bearing on discourse? My verbal technique is one of mosaic collage,
not unlike the e-mail exchange we are participating in. I'm as likely to
borrow a word as a passage, or to rewrite another's e-mail message. I'm not
attending to create confusion, though the self-same list where I picked up the
quote on Lyotard expresses a consensus that post-modern thinking posits an
underlying realism of chaos. Is this Lyotard's line? I'm fond of the idea that
it is a human attribute to seek form and pattern in chaos... sort of like the
myth of Adam starting out first thing by naming things. Giving order to
disorder, building context, which leads to social discourse, and fewer
trickster roles.

>  Once upon a time I was a poet. I was lucky enough to have a book published
>  with a very flattering introduction by a very eminent statesman of the
>  craft.
>  In that introduction he referred to my alterego- the "voice" I had invented
>  to get something out- as "a latter-day J. Alfred Prufrock". I didn't know
>  what the hell he was talking about. What was he reading? Or, drinking?
>  There was a lesson in there somewhere, and I'm still trying to figure it
>  out.

I envision poet as a state of always becomming but never being... being as a
static reference point in a messy soup of language. Swim with the fishys, I
conclude, both with the monsters and the benign. I've always been insecure of
eminent statesmen of the craft, and have often found reason to avoid them -
when you find the lesson please let me know.

Possibly thankfully you are saying you were a poet in the past tense. I was
also a poet once, no more. I spend a lot of time avoiding *poets*, including
myself, because of their penchant for petty politics (my wife being a noted
exception to my general rule of avoidance). So many words spread over so
little revenue.

Then again, I'm terribly biased in the belief that poetry generated from
academia, from creative writing programs, is a terrible, terrible cultural
fraud. I feel really bad for young students who are encouraged to indebt
themselves to the banks in order to paste words together in especially pretty
patterns.

One time I had an opportunity to be thrown in jail for 60 days (served 10) --
part of the sentence was each day I was to write a poem on a particular
subject, the American flag, and at the end of each day rip it up and start
over. At the end of the term I was to read the judge the poem. The judge also
advised me to get a job and write a useful book, like a history of baseball
(which was a bad example for him to use as baseball has never had any meaning
for me outside of idle conversation - in other words, he was advising me that
what I find useless the world finds usefull and what I find to be senseless is
the core of sensibility) - I'm still stuck on these formative experiences and
find myself writing a text on preserving outhouses and other one room
structures.

My attraction to Pound initially was his insisting that poetry should _need_
to be written. Then he went and wrote the Cantos for which it is by my lights
questionable the core need - I wonder if he did not get stuck in his own
cyclical myth. My suspicion is that I have always totally missread Pound, and
find myself now comfortable with that. I then got hooked on his barbed-wire
economics, theories of light, Vivaldi, Wyndham Lewis, ideas about
doppelgangers, real education and good art as energy-enhancing activities, and
an appreciation that you could be totally wacked, out-of-sync with the vortex,
and still be interesting. I got more from the threads where Pound lead me to,
than any sense of a core-belief expressed by Pound.

I also got an ethical idea that when you build a building, or repair one, that
the intent should be to make it last a long time.

I have discovered that I prefer to poets the company of painters, sculptors,
and musicians... but only if they first admit they are carpenters,
hairdressers, and pizza makers. I come to this conclusion by looking around
and counting the people that I have the least problems socializing with. The
eminent statesmen of the craft that I have bumped into have been uninspiring
and a psychological cause to negate hero worship; Ginsberg, Plymell, Snyder,
Bly, Creeley (he was drunk at his reading in Buffalo, NY, I sat in the front
row, at the coffee house, and interrupted him to ask that, after driving 90
miles to see him, he at least share his beer, which he refused, so I tuned him
out, at least, reading on the page there are fewer slurs and the book does not
involuntarily fall out of the chair).

As to understanding the response of the world-at-large to the emotive
creation... my agony over trying to decipher the well-meant and encouraging
response of small-press editors caused me to abandon the trivial pursuit of
publication... and if it were not for a few friends, and a few slips into
clarity, I would continue being fully obscure. As well, my angst at reading in
bars and having the bartender answering the phone drowning out the voice,
contributes to my refusal to waste time reading in public.

I find it more rewarding to fix old buildings.

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