New and Selected Poems, 1957-2011

Statement of Poetics, or Goodbye to Myself

71 STATEMENT OF POETICS, OR GOODBYE TO MYSELF I wrote for myself for people. I’ve changed, I’ve changed since I began writing I write for myself. I believe more than ever in music, in the sound, however gotten, of music in people’s poetry. Rhyme more than ever. Talk people talking, getting that into one’s poetry that is my poetics. Love hate lies laughing stealings self-confession, self-destruction. No one has to read them. No one has to publish them. I am more and more for unpublished poetry. That is why I have a pseudonym, that is why I now publish poetry. To hell with the Business of Anthologies. To hell with Anthologies. One way and another I have written angry for twenty years. Now I want music and the sounds of people. I want poems that use the word heart and self-confession and incorrect 72 grammar and the soils and stains of Neruda and Lorca and Kabir and Williams and Whitman and Yeats. Forty-four years old. Stand on my head ten minutes daily morning breakfast, supper. Writing less and less. Evaporating into the air feet first. I won’t ever die. I’ll simply stand on my head and disappear into the air just like that. I don’t believe in imagination. The prairies as a landscape are imagination. England is, as a landscape, a failure of imagination. Kenya is imagination, India is reaching even further than that. And that is why I will go to India, which I will in seven days time. So this is a time capsule in case anyone is interested and in case I never come back. 73 Goodbye for now, goodbye goodbye goodbye to myself, goodbye goodbye for now goodbye myself, goodbye for now goodbye. This page intentionally left blank. ...