An act of the mind. To move, to make happen, to make manifest. Be an act of Congress.
A state of real existence rather than possibility. And poets love possibility! They love to wonder and explore.
Hard lot! But the poem, no matter how full of possibility, has to exist! To conduct oneself, to behave.
How a poem acts marks its individual character.
A poem by Glandolyn Blue does not sound like a poem by Timothy Sure. to pretend, feign, impersonate.
That, too, yes and always, because self-consciousness is its own pretension, and has been from its beginning;
the human mind is capable of a great elastic theatre. As the poet Ralph angel puts it,
“The poem is an interpretation of weird theatrical shit.”
the weird theatrical shit is what goes on around us every day of our lives; an animal of only instinct,
Johnny Ferret, has in his actions drama, but no theater;
theater requires that you draw a circle around the action and observe it from outside the circle; in other words,
self-consciousness is theatre.

Everyone knows that if you query poets about how their poems begin, the answer is always the same: a phrase, a line,
a scrap of language, a rhythm, an image, something seen, heard, witnessed, or imagined.
And the lesson is always the same,
and young poets recognize this to be one of the most important lessons they can learn:
if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley,
at the top of a cliff you haven’t even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error.

I believe many fine poems begin with ideas, but if you tell too many faces this, or tell it too loudly,
they will get the wrong idea.

Now here is something really interesting (to me),
something you can use at a standing-up-only party when everyone is tired of hearing there are one million
three-thousand-two-hundred-ninety-five words used by the Esimo for snow.
This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some languages are so constructed—English among them—that we
each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. That sentence begins with your first words,
toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine,
or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. Or, if you are blessed,
they are heard by someone who knows you and loves you and will be sorry to hear the sentence end.

When I told Mr. Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: “That’s a lot of semicolons!” he is absolutely right;
the sentence would be unwieldy and awkward and resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon
(which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry)
you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing,
invented by a human being—an Italian as a matter of fact—that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that
for all apparent purposes is unrelated.

You might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last,
the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart.
Between the first and last lines there exists—a poem—and if it were not for the poem that intervenes,
the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other.

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