Thought Experiments, pt. 2

Brewer's Art glowed dimly last night, and beer flowed cool and fresh. Never been there before; even though it was a ways downtown, the place was still packed with student-looking types and young yuppies, a picture of Baltimorean "gentrification," as Jessica would probably describe it...though I suppose it is on the very northern edge of Mt. Vernon.

Before that, bus'd down to the new LoFi Social Club for Mouth Curved Moonlike's last show--Brian and Greg of the band are somewhat friends of mine--and to hang out with Monica, whom I haven't seen since March. Also met her husband Jason who, besides fronting an industrial band, apparently also works on an ambient project called Grains of Sound. Yes, that name was confirmed to be a reference to granular synthesis. Praise the man.

This week's topic: the poet and his public. I believe this relates somewhat to the conversation Joe and I had on the bus to Pittsburgh: why write? Historically speaking, I started writing for the same reason anyone started writing, which was the same reason I started doing anything else--because I was a melancholic bastard. I'm pretty sure the earliest things I wrote--meaning 10th grade or before--were little more than the results of my being too shy to just man up and say directly to the world, "I'm sad, love me." In those primitive stages, then, I suppose one could say my so-called "public" consisted of, mainly, other sad bastards, because Lord knows they were the only ones who would give a damn. In addition, these other sad bastards were all too eager to encourage me to become a "sad bastard what writes" after their own form: e.g. Patrick, Ben.

The next stage, I believe, had a bit of a "beatnik" slant; the last couple of years of high school I became involved with figures who never failed to play Neal Cassady to my Jack Kerouac...Andrew was the exemplar of this, obviously, but also Emily and Fiona, and later Alice. In this stage, writing was "the way"--a ritualistic shared experience, much like hopelessly and deliberately opaque Opendiary entries, night drives blasting CDs in Andrew's car, coffee and cigarettes at diners, blank washes of sea-noise at the beach house, conversations in the sunny room with the couches in the back of the library, and so on. A sort of evolution from the "sad bastard" phase to the "cult of the sad bastards" phase, if you will. Much of my writing at this stage--whatever the poems may have been about--was celebratory, and in a collective sense: of the fact that we were, of the fact that we were not alone, or at least not as alone as I had previously assumed. During this stage, as important as producing a refined finished product and getting it in print was running over drafts with Andrew &al and gaining their approval; although, after we took over The Lit senior year, the last two things were pretty synonymous, anyway.

After I cut loose from the trappings of suburban Jersey, this last stage began to wane. I wrote virtually no poetry for the first year and a half of college. After wandering into Williamson's classroom and somehow getting stuck there for a year and a half, I became fascinated with the logistics of poetry, probably due to Wmson's perpetual emphasis on formalism and formal exploration. Sort of like when I started playing bass, and became really obsessed with trying to play it different ways... The downside of that was there was no real reason I went on writing poetry, other to prove that I could, and that I could in newer, more interesting ways. (It's been a spectacularly unromantic couple of years, needless to say.)

But anyway, to get back to the conversation with Joe...there was some talk of manifesting some part of yourself outside of yourself, to others...I can't recall the exact wording right now, of course. To take things stuck in my mind and try to let them exist somewhere else as well, though their form is compromised, since my inner monologue (like most inner monologues) tends toward the fuzzy, and fuzzy signals do not transmit...that's the price one pays whenever one opens one's mouth to speak, but I suppose it is better than nothing at all.

It is...it is, I suppose, much like carrying around in your mind a little room trapped in a snowglobe--now wouldn't that give you a headache?--and sneaking into someone's house at night with drill and jackhammer, tearing into their walls while they slept, and building that room from scratch for the unsuspecting owner of the house to find in the morning, but when they do you'll have long since scampered off into the night like the rodent you are. Yes, I believe that's an okay place to start.

*This entry produced under the simultaneous influence of Earl Grey and Craig Finn. And Morrissey: "They say, 'there's too much caffeine in your bloodstream, and a lack of real spice in your life...'"