Michael Bauer

yah, well, i'm the beta and gamma to your alpha and omega, so let's play bridge. you can't lawyer your way into saying that everything is poetry, while bitching at critics for making poems about your poems. poetry is always about reality, and reality is about playing with words. let's play bridge.

cancer on the gemini cusp. i've been writing for 50 years and i still don't know how to write a short story that's not a poem without linebreaks. i've been around, and have to admit that i'm distilled down to just a poet. i think i write some of the most beautiful poetry ever written, but i don't think "beauty" is a too much desired quality in modern poetry. i do feel that if i will read philosophical thoughts, i'll read a philosopher... my poetry has to work the same universals that philosophers work or it's not poetry. i'm very musical, music builds my writing and is the inside soundtrack, even as i'm writing this... (it's a very open and star-aetherial Schubert Quartet today, cause i'm sad). real poetry builds an emotion, invents emotion in us, by building a landscape made out of raw and unheard melody. anyway, i love to write, and i just wanted to write this little thing today to kind of share back.

added, 8/07, a forum post from another site:

i'm speaking out of peace and introspection. this thought and thinking about how the parts of my body turn inward and become language is the great rebirth. i'm thinking you're thinking i'm argument'ive, but you're maybe seeing what you want, and you want passion and i'm just a simple catagory 5 storm with some fuzzy clouds around my head.


hummm... 'memory', 'moment' -- don't you sometimes think that memory is totally dynamic, and that when we write our poetry we not only come to understand meaning in our experience but, maybe, actually invent the experience? that image i used, the turning the body inward? that's like, i'm converting the expressive energies of my gestures, my dance expression, into some space of contrasts, where word is the skin of thought and our concepts come out all naked and frightening? and we clothe them in "this is like", and "once i saw...", and they can dance our dance?



i'm working on this image that occured to me, about how it is that my dance gestures, any reaching out into the world, are pushed back into my entire body so that it becomes a gesture... not a dance body motion, but an internalization of dance, and not in my head but in every part of me, because i'm suddenly conscious. and that's the many-levels, i think -- that our senses are suddenly part of the dance gesture as writing, and that we express "emotions" as dance gestures as poetry.

it would be neat if there were only dedicated writers here. there'd be no discussion like this, because we'd treat each other in good faith. it's the slackers that need the protection from their own darkness. why don't they write out that darkness and redeem themselves as artists and people? someone mentioned a "bhudda"... if it were so, then what would the buddha care if you have a body? i write body as landscape, and a picture is worth way less than a thousand words, if the words are important to the reader. body is part of nature.

added 8.11.07

most the reviews of my work that i do get make me think that the reader hardly read them -- skimmed them. the reviews i read of other's work make me think that most people here haven't written enough nor have read enough. i think people should stop looking at the pictures. you should be worried about your failures as writers and critics.

... i'm not really happy at all having to write this. it was for a forum, and forums are breeding grounds for bullies -- punking you out with self rightousness cause they can't punk out their boss... and i turn into a far more resonant person there than i'd like to be. it makes me think how to write, in order to respond to them, but it's not good for me. these are people who use writing, and it makes me doubt myself, because i use writing to try to understand. i'm spending too much time explaining things to myself so that i can explain to someone else... too much time? i've got a million years to write and one year to live. i have the time to try and say it better.

8.13.07

the problem for us is that most tribal art, village art is in an expected form, one which allows the story told, and with no variation. the hero always must win. we're inventing an art, and everyone is looking at it, even people who don't like art. they comment, they dispise, they praise... how can it be different from the jug? when does the jug begin to be a jug? at the rim, where you pour in the water? or at the corner of the room, when you hear your master say, "bring me that jug".

i bring it, but i do not know if it's a jug. they pour from it, but they hate its pure water.