Aesthetic openness

                                          
                                          
                                             
is my  way.  Why?  I prefer variety.  I want the signs 
I use to be partners in what I make.  Do I never force
my will on those signs?  Not never, but wicked wonders
they often are/ that have in them wisdoms I would miss
if I was always constraining them to my designs.  Let
them breathe.  Stanley Kunitz believed poems come as a
kind of blessing.  So do I.  Besides, though I do want my
artifacts to please and enhance, I don't demand praise 
for any of them.                                      
                                                       
I realize I'm taking risks, and that in the end I might
be a lonely and forgotten group of one,  but if that is
the fate of my project I'll still have the satisfaction of
knowing I did not shatter/ my own lights.  Moment-to-
moment each must do as each sees.  Like Jon Anderson
said about his: my poetry is not for everyone.  (But,
Brian, you don't write poems.  Well, shit.  That's
right: that's what it is.  Thank you.)                           
                                                          
So, how does this aesthetic openness play out?  Oddly.
For one thing, lines become more important to me than
whole poems.  I know: that's true for a lot of people.
However, if two people read 25 poems and were asked 
to pick 25 lines, one from each poem, it would be a tad
freaky if their choices were the same.  To begin with,
person 1 might pick a line from poem 4 because it was
hilarious, while person 2 picked a line from poem 4
because it was sonorous.  Have me pick a line from 4
and I might pick one because it had a word in it I
was unfamiliar with.  I'm the same way with popular
songs.  Staggeringly weak rote memory.  When I write
I try to in this noisy world deepen my concentration.
Nonetheless, anything can happen.  There are ways of
making poems I am unlikely to ever try.  During the
last two years though/ I did try several of the less
demanding, especially in my This Day's Poem e-chap
and in my online June 2007 book.  From ditties on
through muttobs, and bad / mediocre / good poems,
most of those I've written and am writing are online.
Muttobs exist in a space between ditties and poems
but it is a fuzzy space.  "Dog On" is an example.
It has six one-word lines, and each word begins with
an "m".  Notice the two conventions I do not follow.
There are others.  There are new ones I've adopted
and new ones I've invented.  I am certain I am not
the only one doing such things.  As an undergrad in
the mid 1960s the professor I took a history of the
English language course under/ predicted that the
apostrophe would fall out use and that eventually
the language would devolve to grunts and groans.  
I have no clue about the language, and "it's" seems
to be the only sticker re the apostrophe.  As to what
happened to the semicolon, I still use it.  I also use
the slash (virgule) as a pause notation.          
                                                     
In my time I have lived through many technologies.
During my childhood we had a mimeograph.  We even
got into laminating and wood burning.  My dad set
ads for the local newspaper, but we never explored
the world of fonts and presses at home and nothing
aroused an interest in me about that world.  I have
consistently used basic HTML since coming online in
2000, but I was more into math than poetry at that
time.  There too I went my own way.  So I am out
there, or in here, or somewhere: I am a flutterby.
One day--last year, I think--I got the idea I could
produce a book of 1024 blank pages.  It would be my
collected works.  Invisible Ink would be its title.
I mention this because I don't want K G to one-up 
me on it.  Lawrence Sterne is probably laughing.
Doesn't all this tickle your widgets.  A few years
ago--maybe it was in 2004--I created a new Olympic
sport: Dot Dancing.  There's an explanation of it
in one of my journals.  See my "2 Curious Lines" 
poem (?) in the ghost in the dumpster and read my
comment on it if you happen to read this and have
not yet read that.  Contagious cadenzas.
                                                 
                                                     
                                               
                                              
                                       
                                                 
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