WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS UNDERSTOOD

One-hundred twenty-six people looked in a couple of days ago to see what's happening here. I finally put together the ms Wrestling Hanshan and sent it off to a contest, but, today, Monday, I feel so out of it that not a creative synapse is firing within the old cranium. Nada, even in a clean well-lighted room like this Starbucks I'm sitting in. Increasingly, I experience these hazy mornings, lethargic and uncreative. I checked four movies out of the library this morning. Maybe I need to go home and watch one. An odd movie is A Ghost Story.

I've also again taken out of the library the book American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One. Bios for each poet in the volume are included. You'd be surprised how many of their lives end in suicide. Also the range of poetry is surprising. Many wrote in styles I just do not understand. Last month's Poetry Magazine out of Chicago was dedicated to Native Americans who write poetry. Most of their poems were totally beyond my experience to understand. Don't get it, not at all. Why write poetry that most will not understand unless they take a college course? Even Bill Williams understood. Of course, he then wrote many poems that are hard to understand, even for a intelligent gent like myself. 

I wanted to write a poem

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

if you can’t understand it?

                        — W.C. Williams

Exactly.

WRITING WRITING WRITING .... POETRY

Marsden Hartley. Like this one.

Tonight was looking over Marsden Hartley's art as his poetry is included in American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. It's late, nearing midnight on Friday. For weeks, I've been writing and rewriting the ms of lüshi I now call, Plain As Day: Old Grayhouse Consults Hanshan. I'm hooked on poetry again. Can't write enough of it. It's wonderful to feel this way about writing poetry again. Poetry was, I think, my first love, but I saw there was little money in it, and, crass as I've been, I put it aside except for occasional spurts of energy. My eye is still on a final rewrite of the sci fi novel, Ghoul World. I'm sure I'll get to it in time. If I don't, my bucket list is bust, or I'll have to add "to write all the best poetry I can in my 80s. I'm pretty happy about the poetry so far, quite happy.