Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I've Been Away... And I Didn't Even Notice

You know that old Zen koan that has become a punchline for futility: if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? (Quit bugging, that's close enough.) Well, that's what this blog is like. A tree falling. In a vast forest of blogs. And I can promise you, it doesn't make a sound.

Mostly, of course, because there's only two people I've told about the blog. When I started I wanted to put lots of content on it before I told anyone it existed so that when they got here there would be lots to explore.

But then I got bored and lazy and stopped adding content. And now it's much much later and I'm coming back to it.

Part of the reason I'm coming back is that Mo has tagged me to reveal 7 Really Personal and Weird Things About Myself. Which I'll do in the next day or two, as soon as I think of some. The other reason is that Mo (again with the Mo) got me to read at the opening party for her show at The Fall Cafe the Saturday before Thanksgiving. And... I had a great time. I don't remember all of it because I went way way WAY overboard with my anti-anxiety medication (double gin and tonics courtesy of Bar Great Harry) and was barely coherent when I began reading. At least I think I was. I did recover somewhat because I had to focus so hard on the words on the page and not slurring them that I sobered myself up a bit. By the end, people clapped and there may have been cheering--though the cheering might have been coming from me for finshing the reading upright.

The point is, it was a good experience. The rest of the evening was amazing, with Lauren Balthrop performing her first solo show which was pretty incredible. (If there aren't links in this post I'll come back and link later... or link in the next entry. Check there.) In preparation for the reading I spent about a month writing new material and read almost exclusively new poems, some of which turned out pretty good. In fact, a couple of people even told me that they don't like poetry but they liked my poetry. Which is a strange thing to have said to you--if you're totally paranoid like me. Does that mean I'm onto something that might be new or accessible or otherwise refreshing? Or does it mean I'm so off base I should quit now? Obviously, I'm going with the first interpretation.

Here's one of the new poems:

The Physics of Sweaters

The sweater that blonde is wearing is gorgeous.
Well, not the sweater so much, not really, it’s nice,
an ivory wool blend, off the shoulders, whatever,
it’s a sweater, but the form that sweater implies
is gorgeous. Of course I can’t know about that form
with any certainty but I’m certain it’s doing things
for my morale no pill could. The curves that give
the sweater its shape, they’re something to write
home about. I assume they are, again, we live in a
quantum mechanical world, where we can assign
formulas and data without ever being sure those
equations are the ones bolstering the universe.
The beams and joists of the universal frame aren’t
going to collapse if we’re wrong, the universe will
go on in much the same shape it’s in now, we’d just
like to know—like, you know, for funs ya’ll. You can
change the shape but not the value! Beaten into me,
the mantra that explains the constancy of matter and
one or more principles of physics, somebody’s laws
of motion or energy, something. So we can’t know,
so what? Some people would say that not knowing
is half the fun, especially when it comes to sweaters.
Let me set one thing straight here: I’m married, happily,
and my wife’s sweaters are enough for me, they raise
my morale plenty. It’s just, when it comes to knowing
or not, I know…and the unknown is so inherently
dazzling…which, evidently, is the appeal of quantum
mechanics. Some sweaters are known, some are not,
we can assign formulas all we want and never understand
any more than we do right now in this moment. And as
gorgeous as they may or may not be, or the forms that
give them form, it doesn’t hurt when the jeans that
go with the ivory wool blend look like that, when they
imply legs the shape of which no mathematical formula
could hope to explain and which, applied in the proper
proportion, could boost the morale of an entire army
of lonely scientists.

(Nov. 2007)

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