04.10.08
Un-erasing some personal history
SK, you can ‘erase personal history’ by ‘un-erasing it’, autobiographically.
SK comments on
http://history-and-evolution.com/nemonemini/index.html
SK: i think you should write more poetry.. Actually these things don’t happen according to plan, or as you will. The nemo sonnet, in its original form, appeared out of nowhere. After I began living in the streets, I finally made my way west and rode around on freight trains, writing a lot of poetry. Nice life.
I always remember the Nemo poem moment: I had caught a train out of Amarillo Texas, at the end of a grain car with its little platform and cubby hole, at night and woke up in Texline, Texas, the train stopped for some reason. The poem came to me all at once and I looked in my backpack for a pencil, nothing. So I simultaneously composed and memorized the whole thing, writing it down after the train arrived in Colorado. Story of my life. Poet, not always a pencil handy.
It’s funny, I always thought of myself as a ‘poet’ (competing with a kind of mathematical geekish type, math my other obsession, for a short period), but sometimes poets live in the realm of the unmanifest or semi-manifest. There must be a Welsh village somewhere wherein poets struck dumb go to live. Does it matter?
Actually my real poetic career was like Rimbaud’s, over by the time I reached age nineteen. I went through an explosion, suddenly writing poetry, some of it in French.
I was knocked senseless by the experience, and never really recovered. I remember going through college after the experience, really a kind of samadhi or something, nothing to do with poetry, in a kind of daze. I was a good classics student, but it seems my knowledge peeked the first week of my freshman year. Strange: I went through the whole college period completely alone: I never met or befriended another student, attended any college events, talked to any professors, or had any college experiences, except going to classes, taking exams, and walking away with my degree. My senior year I suddenly realized classics wasn’t functional in the Great American Economy, so I took a course in calculus, really enjoyed it, so I began to tutor myself in math, and went into the Peace Corps as a math teacher. I actually had a minor talent in the subject (very minor) and ended up teaching A level math (basically Newtonian statics/dynamics), the last year. No mean feat for someone in the British system, who has never taken a course in physics. But they thought I could handle it, so I taught the course, amen.
Those two contraries can tear the mind to pieces.
Many years later as I was travelling the urge to write poetry came back for a while, perhaps to remember and understand the early years. I found all that stuff in a box recently, funny to look through it.
I mention all this because the issue of poets, or being one, was, more than some narcissistic art trip, a means to discover the dark side of the ‘sufi hyenas’, on the prowl to vampirize some unsuspecting dupe of sufism.
The last fag end of the great tradition of sufi poets.
Poets beware.
Stephen P. Smith said,
April 10, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Maybe some of the poems can be shared on the blog?
sillykitty said,
April 10, 2008 at 10:08 pm
i don’t get your whole ‘poet’s beware’ riff at all. i wish i understood. the way i hear it i think you mean that being vulnerable and ‘open’ is a curse. i could understand the logic of that, coming from most people, but not from you..poet that you are. and sufi, (not the shark kind i don’t think) fakir, mystic…being transparent becomes its own sanctuary, no? and the metaphor for ‘homelessness.’ did you ever see ‘the mission’ with robert de niro and jeremy irons? the end of the movie is about that. and the story of the crucifiction/resurrection…okay. enough…see? i am feeding into the sufi shark paradigm…but it is true, and they are right, along with nietzsche, that what doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger. sigh…
the place poetry comes from doesn’t go away–unless maybe you make some really bad life choices (sell-out) like i’ve always thought rimbaud must have???. i think it waits. do you feel it more in spring? did you ever come to california? l.a? are you making up the details of a phony bio? that would be very sufi of you if it were true…..i used to write short stories before i met x. he moved in and the computer promptly went broken. literally! didn’t turn back on ’til 3 monthes after x was gone. by then the urge to write seemed like narcissitstic clap-trap. i shut it way down and haven’t been able to start it back up again, ten years later, even by wishing and trying. mysterious. please don’t stop…
most of all maybe…i wonder what you mean by this:
‘I mention all this because the issue of poets, or being one, was, more than some narcissistic art trip, a means to discover the dark side of the ’sufi hyenas’, on the prowl to vampirize some unsuspecting dupe of sufism.’
i wish i knew what you meant, but i don’t.
sillykitty said,
April 10, 2008 at 10:39 pm
p.s. writer/artists requested or discussed at bookstore today:
rimbaud
james baldwin
richard brautigan
thoreau
kenneth patchen
van morrison
william s. burroughs
jack keruoac
thomas pynchon
thomas de quincey
charles baudelaire
anne rice
oscar wilde
allen ginsberg
norman mailer
frida kahlo
mary oliver
edgar allen poe
sebold
gregory corso
william shakespeare
chelsea quinn yarbro
marianne faithful
the rolling stones
bjork
nick cave
maya lin
martin scorcese
an incomplete list from a bad memory…only open five hours!
if anything will save us, poetry might, math never will (?????)
nemo said,
April 10, 2008 at 10:47 pm
sk, i am not a ‘sufi’, and it is dangerous to use such terms. People will track you down and kill you if you are not a moslem. OK?
sillykitty said,
April 11, 2008 at 7:58 pm
OK!
‘why i am not a moslem’…sounds like a good title for a sufi shark expose.
(bad joke.)
did you hear about, maybe you know the story? of when salman rushdie’s satanic verses came out and book stores were getting bomb threats from islamic fundamentalists if they so much as carried it? jeannette watson, owner of books & co (you probably shopped there?) in new york, and her staff, decided, after receiving the bomb threats, to order a huge amount from the publisher and do a ‘satanic verses’ window display–right there on madison avenue! (i think it was madison avenue? next to the whitney museum?) luckily, they were not bombed. on one rainy afternoon though, a tall man with a beard, wearing a trench coat and a low-brimmed fedora hat, stealthily entered the store. maybe no one even noticed him? he wandered over to the mountainous stacks of rushdie’s satanic verses and took out a pen. patrons of the store soon noticed that the mystery man was discreetly SIGNING each book: ‘salman rushdie.’ the legend goes that rushdie stayed like that for hours, quietly signing until each and every book was signed. books and co quickly sold all the copies of ‘satanic verses’ they had bought.
sillykitty said,
April 11, 2008 at 8:02 pm
i read that rushdie story in an oral biography of the now long deceased, books & co, written by lynne tillman. a great book.
nemo said,
April 12, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Fascinating, and very relevant, although I differentiate sufism and Islam.
I am fascinated by these book store snapshots, what’s with that?
sillykitty said,
April 12, 2008 at 9:40 pm
okay, call it ‘why i am not a sufi.’
my memoir/expose will be called ‘i hate gurdjieff: a memoir of the 4th way.’
nemo said,
April 12, 2008 at 11:17 pm
good idea