Truth be told, I have never blogged before and I have to admit I never liked the idea of blogs --why would we spend so much time writing and reading each other's 'blah-blah' opinions (what I have to admit) when we could be writing the "real" stuff? I also have to admit, I never write on the computer, always on plain paper art journals first--the physical act of writing seems to be the only way I can write poetry or essays. There, that was the truth then, but, here I am now, finding myself grateful to have the opportunity to "speak" and have fun in this new fashion. It has made me do some research away from books--blog-fodder to carry around in the hungry head. I wasn't sure what I could offer, therefore I've decided each blog would include something from our everyday "culture" and each would introduce a new "unknown" west coast author. I know this will be imperfect and I 'll only be able to mention a few, so please forgive. With that, I'll begin the first day with this:
SPEAKING TRUTH...
is not easy, according to Kafka, since "the truth is alive and therefore has lively changing face," which get us off the hook when it comes to poetry dishing out some of the very best lies and recounting truths we can quote. Keat's palindrom-like equation, " Beauty is truth, truth beauty " is like telling yourself you are dreaming as you are dreaming. A poem can convince us with its music and its imagery; a poem may woo us from prejudice, echo a moral imperative, and occasionally surprise us with some new "fact." I'm not very interested in fact or fiction within an individual poem, but I am interested in how it speaks to me. Bill Maher's Los Angeles Times Op-Ed on the "birthers," another inane religious group who are questioning Obama's US citizenship, brings up the point that "arrant nonsense" can thrive and breed and become so visibly present it must be true. Adrienne Rich said, " False history gets made all day, any day / the truth of the new is never on the news." If this was said to me in person, I'd say, "That's so true!" Language persuades and diction pervades. History's past chased after the word of religion right up to the present's front step. The mirage of objectivity keeps us running forward. Now Einstein understood the importance of not being too certain about the truth, that we mustn't set ourselves up to be a judge of it unless we want to be "shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." Poetry and its readers also seem to know this. So, when James Tate wrote, "You are the stranger that gets stranger by the hour," we said yes at the edge of the mirror. When Shakespeare called, "Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom" we answered in our dream. When the Inuit poet said "That's the way it was," that's the way it was. When Dana Levin cautioned us, " Don't, don't-- ," the monarch butterflies stayed at the back of the throat. We speak, therefore we exist. We close our eyes, find ourselves cross-legged inside apparitional space, but something creeps in and repeats itself over and over like a bad song. The truth is not always synonymous with reality. Reality gives that cliche´ hard knock. Carroll Kearley, in his debut book (Diety Alphabets, Tebot Bach, 2009) at 79, with a steadfast gaze at the truth, writes about the homeless population in Santa Monica California. That's a truth that belongs to all of us. Our parents handed us some of the first truths we knew and very often, they were not ones that set us free. Now, living much of the time in the imagination, I tell myself I don't have to believe it. George Orwell said an illusion can become a half-truth. Who can forget Stevens' question, "Where was it one first heard of the truth?" The truth and nothing but the truth, so help me poet. I do not have to make up my mind, I can let my fellow poets do it for me. Why? Because I say so...
