streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 7:57 am on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: POETRY ( 12 ), WRITING   

  WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW 

  Here’s writing fit for public consumption. There’s no politics nor science, no physics nor evolution, no cuss words nor sex, no spicy pickled metaphors, no right nor wrong, no meaning, no nothing, just letters holding hands forming words forming phrases going to market, staying home, having roast beef, having none, and making the funny sounds of verbal contentment all the way home. I’m ready to celebrate the mundane, revel in the morning blush on the evening primrose, and revel in the morning blush on my wife’s face. I’m ready to publicly mourn the birth of my dog and the death of my dad, exult in the toothless smile of a bum and the toothless smile of a lad. Nobody wants cosmic poems pretending to fathom the heights of quantum physics or wallow in the death of suicidal despair. It fails to inspire and it’s just not civilized. Still photography is my role model, cool remote and serene. I want to paint with words, watercolors and oils according to the mood. I wish I could write other people’s poems. I wish I could arrange flowers elaborately, poems in the shape of chalices and goblets, valises and vases, all containing internal logic, hard-wired beauty. I want to get out of my rut and get into a groove. Alas I’m stuck in my own body, trapped in my own mind, doing the best I can one day at the time. I can’t write other people’s shit; I can only write my own.

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    leafless 10:18 am on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    I like your manifesto. Some interesting lines.

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  hardie karges 9:00 am on June 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: POETRY ( 12 ), WRITING   

  THE BIZNIZ OF POETRY 

  Poetry is what happens in the cracks, the empty spaces, the margins along paper’s rim, bar chits, and bills not yet paid, void if detached. The recycled paper bin is the wellhead of new thought. Poetry is what comes out when the brain is unwinding, disengaged, coasting downhill after a long night of tossing and turning. The early morning hours are fertile ground for plowing, fallow fields for planting. Poetry is a job where you gotta’ be on call. If you can’t write in the dark, then you don’t get the job. Poetry is what happens between acts, entertainment that truly holds you between. We’re competing with jugglers and clowns; we’re not competing with scientists and philosophers. A word is worth a thousand pictures. Writing is like gene-splicing, re-shuffling the codons. The most innocent mutations can lead to entirely new species. I mine my memories to see if there’s something I forgot, cross-reference myself to find out where I stand, second-guess myself as to where I’ll likely end up. Writing is like sex; I try different positions to make it come out fast and hard, in light hot licks.
   
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  hardie karges 10:50 am on June 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), MUSIC ( 8 ), WRITING   

  EDIT THYSELF 

  “Edit thyself” is the first commandment of writing and the hardest thing for anyone to do with his own work. We love our own work as our own children and hate to cut anything out. More than that, it’s just hard to look at one’s own work objectively, even harder to toss things out, knowing you might never get them back. That’s the feeling you get when the computer goes dead and you haven’t saved your work. It’s a question of negative space and positive space. Are you creating something where nothing previously existed or are you chipping away at the whole potato, just to reveal the precious sculpture within? Is the potato half full or half empty? Are you creating something out of nothing or are you merely clearing away the rubbish so that the diamond can shine through? As a child aficionado of popular music, I lamented the fact that most of the appropriate themes of life had already been discovered, and that therefore the future of the industry was grim, a sad thought, considering the amount of enjoyment that it’s capable of giving. Such are the vagaries of youth. There is no limit to creativity. Its potential is exponential. The more we create, the more there is to create, stone shards, wood shavings, clay splatters, paint drips, wasted words, all just like the film snips lying on the edit room floor of a life almost too abundant for living.