#3. "These things happen little rosier scenario by little" [Some of the foreword revised.]
This phoem needs cleaning up but it’s a favorite accomplishment of mine. [New edits to update the foreword are in [ ] brackets along the way.]
In an effort to produce a new poem/phoem, I become far too obsessed with “getting the pieces to fit [with an obsessive’s sense of “near perfect”]. This sustained focus on [“the near perfect,” truly novel, and entirely impractical] opened a huge gap on the publishing side where the weeks just grew into piles of passing time, and then pushed publishing what I’ve already got [pretty much done farther and further] into the future: TODAY [that TODAY was 6 mos. back ago (11/22/22) from where I am now, 6/2/23.] So I’ll try to keep this short. (Well short for me.) I’m certain that this hiatus surely provokes a sense that I’m less than serious about getting my talent for “Peculiar Ingenuity” read seriously as a Substack. [Reading this now, 6/2/23, the 6 months from what I just referenced as “that TODAY,” seems like more than sufficient evidence that I am “decidedly less than serious.”] It appears that [“waiting forever] to clean up nicely” [even a part] of what I’ve produced [I’ll] never get to publishing with sufficient frequency for readers to remember me. [A “more likely than not” conclusion.] Most writers learn there comes a time where the need [to have one’s readers pay attention to you as a writer of any sort obligates one to make discipline] paramount:
Recognize this is a blog, not a novel. Readers expect installments at intervals that keep interest on more than life support.
When the version in front of me is imperfect, but “sturdy enough,” one must be decisive; choose to take some pride in publishing even with the poem’s last darling still bleeding at the roadside, even before one sees to having it “cleaned up nicely” [or waiting for Beauty to come along and shoot it!]
One must learn to recognize that at some point any more reworking of their poetry: i.e, “greater compression,” “more/less slant,” “better melodic rhythm,” “pulling commas whose collective weight [are like weeds] that inevitably slow the reader’s progress [to a crawl or a halt].” Such reworked, reworking is needless exertion that produces enough heat to overbake the piece.
The following piece [“These things happen…”] as you can see from the [photographic] image of the collaged version, has hours of fingerprinting, a few ink-smudged indecipherable clots, missing bits of words sunk in a [curdling coagulum] of blackened glue... it’s the history of the craft involved spilled large all over the page to produce visibly [textured evidence of the writer’s work that the reader of a clean page never sees]. The needs of my method of production must always be balanced against readability. Leaving “just enough” unclear and messy [is a useful challenge for those who find the method intriguing] but could also just be for “illustrative purposes.” You can skip that “readability challenge” and go to the clean, typed version.]
One look and the least demanding of readers knows that there’s the work of “cleaning it up nicely"still to come. (Don’t know why it came out pinkish??) See last installment (#2’s image, “Why is there a problem?”) for one that is “cleaned up more nicely.” For a phoem like this [I will need an hour at best but often two or more of] Photoshopping to make the original a readable version. In the meantime, I’ll repeat, refer to the typed version following the imaged version if you find the image alone too frustrating. You can also try enlarging the document and the original is more readable [and with the textured effort visible, in my opinion, a more interesting piece since it defines “how I write poetry.”] ). I’ve said it before somewhere: [Since we are taught to read collections of letter symbols for meaning, it’s hard but it’s best you learn to resist it for my poetry. Read first for affect/feelings provoked (as happens with music; this could be “jazz with words”) since emotion provides the foundation, the intent and the context when it comes to taking a stab, if that’s important, at a cognitized interpretation. Evolution provided us with feelings long before cognitive symbol making and interpretation began to dominate. Stopping at how the piece makes you feel, and how those feelings shift, is fine. Think about your dog, or for that matter, almost any animal, but especially mammals: they live in a world of sensed feeling, period. There’s no “code,” no guiding footnotes, and no supplementary appendix I can give you to decipher an intended meaning for my poetry… there is none. That work, if you choose it, is up to you. Your “understanding” of the piece is not something I assume is necessary to enjoy it.
These things happen little rosier scenario by little
Somewhere on the other side of what makes a woman
desirable to herself, lolls Brigitte Bardot–an active verb, alive
in the trousers of politics. A touching burst of applause
ripples like advice on pants as a good place to start exploring
how to fondle a bayonet with dirty money
stuck in Senate elevators.
Why?
It is a way to have your wedding cake
runaway and eat it too.
As it happens, most bad dates can be fixed with eyelash glue,
eyebrows painted Cleopatra style reinforced by generous infusions
of treacle. Odds are, emotions will seem hypothetical as the bubbles
of a bosomy starlet’s playful dent in broad daylight. There!
didn’t we just see her spook the already unsettled hum of creaminess
from a one-man defibrillator rattle his crumbling one big thing?
All I remember is starting to drift, suspended in the catnip of a good
lap dance, the wobbled quiver of conceptual softness, really cute dynamite
wrapped in a firecracker, symmetrical and tight as beads of mercury, leaving shim- mering traces in the air.
Bra information? Don’t get me started!
Now the future has arrived on her doughty ship “Rosy Scenario”
floating up on the lilt of a coming boomlet and down along the tide
at the edge of a ferocious clip – on the Scarlet toes of an anarchist!
It’s as if Snow White searching forever under her skirt
to consult something the size of a baby hippo, opened a box and
the pressure inside is missing from the fairytale,
the spatial nature of the discipline spilling optimism.
with the softness of a proper smooch.
Always promising insight, never quite resolving, walking the reader ever-further out on a linked series of rhetorical planks. Nicely done!
Had me laughing out loud in several spots like... "As it happens, most bad dates can be fixed with eyelash glue, eyebrows painted Cleopatra style reinforced by generous infusions of treacle."