barelyawake wrote:doclinkin wrote:Well that sense of the familiar becomes threatening. It could be you, here, on this page.
Oh, I never doubted that is King's ambition. To me, however, the familiar isn't poetry. Poetry is the art of pressing the familiar between the pages of a newly-printed and still-wet dictionary and producing a Rorschach test. It's not blurting out the obvious, but shaping shadows of the familiar until the reader experiences deja vu.
I doubt King considers himself an artist, much. Or aims for poetry. Interesting exercise though, to write the poetry of blurting out the obvious, see if you could make it work. Though come to think of it, wasn't I just talking about Bukowski...?
I guess I go another way about it. Sometimes red is red enough. Charlie Brown would be somewhat less believably wistful if he was talking about that little 'ginger-'haired girl. You'd understand why he might get ostracized and perhaps kicked around a bit. Though maybe I give too much high esteem for good old Charlie Brown, that blockhead.
I once shared a house with 4 'gradual students' in English. Talk about butchers, the majority of conversation about a book, a movie, whatever -- consisted of hacking apart the topic and trying to dissect it in context. Which more often than not consisted of lobbing back and forth jargon and lingo on 'theory' as opposed to, uh, practice. Dunno if any of them could write a lick, I suspect they'd be too paralyzed by that inner critique to risk a word, too easy to judge it against a theoretical shelf of all grand literature. One reason why I love the internet, since the grammar of everyone else is in the mean miserable, I can liberate myself from caring about the tyranny of self-critique, a typo is often left in place like an ataxis, a deliberate flaw that allows the beholder to fix it, to participate, to allow themself an amused disdain that they are you know, smarter than me. It's a courtesy, a generosity.
Or that's my excuse anyway.
Okay (sneaking a poem into the prose thread (though why the hell not) here's a Bukowski riff, poetry of the obvious:
From The Last Night of the Earth Poems, wherein Charles Bukowski wrote:"Are you drinking"
washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook
out again
I write from the bed
as I did last
year.
will see the doctor,
Monday.
"yes, doctor, weak legs, vertigo, head-
aches and my back
hurts."
"are you drinking?" he will ask.
"are you getting your
exercise, your
vitamins?"
I think that I am just ill
with life, the same stale yet
fluctuating
factors.
even at the track
I watch the horses run by
and it seems
meaningless.
I leave early after buying tickets on the
remaining races.
"taking off?" asks the motel
clerk.
"yes, it's boring,"
I tell him.
"If you think it's boring
out there," he tells me, "you oughta be
back here."
so here I am
propped up against my pillows
again
just an old guy
just an old writer
with a yellow
notebook.
something is
walking across the
floor
toward
me.
oh, it's just
my cat
this
time.
You: Oh, how goshe.
