I might not be your man
Last night was one of those nights when Philip and I stayed up to an impossible hour drinking beers and getting excited about art, music, and poetry the way young initiates naively swing the name "Jesus Christ" around, fully believing in its power to change the world right now. Eventually religious initiates learn that Jesus is more of a meditation than a weapon. (Well, Jesus isn't a meditation for me because I am not religious in that way and could never take this whole walking on water thing seriously.) But the point is that last night was spent in excited discussion about why it's so important to write, to paint, to build, to create, and to record the world we live in.
We watched the Leonard Cohen documentary "I'm your man". There were some pretty strange and unpleasant covers of Leonard's songs, but there were about five songs that were so moving we had to play each of them thirty two times into the morning hours, drinking more beer and being awed by Cohen's skill, his humility, his humor, and just...him. We have loved Cohen for a long time and have many of his albums. Like Bowie, Cohen has been a major part of the soundtrack to our lives. There is literally no other person on earth who can talk about a blow job in a song and make you weep for the beauty of it. Bukowski sure can't do that. When Bukowski mentions blow jobs it makes me want to die a little.
I am buzzing with things to say and none of it will come out sounding coherent. The thoughts are coming too fast to make you see the sense of them. So I'll just have to wait.
A number of people (friends and family included) have wondered how I can post something to this blog every single day. Sometimes twice. Where do I find the time? How do I have time to do anything else? I was talking about this with my mom as we headed to Portland to drive aroundgetting lost looking at neighborhoods she might want to live in. I was telling her what keeping a blog has done for my writing skills as well as my mental health.
I think most artists and writers will understand me when I say that I write every single day because I have to. I know they'll understand, because most of them say the same thing themselves. I write because it's as important to me as breathing. I can't NOT write. There have been periods where I wrote irregularly for a few months. Those periods are very dark for me. It feels like suffocating.
This morning I was remembering when I was twenty three, I spent so much time writing poetry and taking it very seriously. I agonized over whether or not I had a right to call myself a writer or more importantly; a poet. Does one have to be good at something to consider themselves a part of it? At what point does a person who writes a bit of poetry become a poet? I agonized because I had written hundreds of poems by this point in my life and I knew that ninety nine percent of them were complete crap. I could feel it in my bones. I knew what I was trying for, what I wanted my words to do, and I couldn't get there. It embarrassed me to tell people that I was poet because I didn't feel worthy.
Then one evening I was looking out over Sutter Street flicker on in the dusk, trying to distill the light into words. Poetry is as much a way of interpreting the way you see the world as it is the art of words themselves. I am always reframing sensory information into a kind of mental shorthand in which two words can stand in place of fifty to describe something. If your brain works this way and in doing it you have a constant hunger to get it out of your head, then you are a poet.
That was it. I may never have a published poem, but I never again questioned myself. Let others do it. Not me. I know others ask themselves similar questions. Artists wonder "If I don't sell any art, am I really an artist? Or am I just a person making art?" What makes a person legitimate? Is it commerce? Is it when other people give you the appellation? Do you have to be good? Who decides if you're good, or good enough?
It's all a question of who you really are. You're an artist if you have to make art. If, even when you hate everything you make, you still do it because if you don't you feel you might die, then you're an artist. If you are compelled to pick up a pen every day because not doing it would make you feel weighted down with a thousand unexpressed words, then you are a writer.
I do spend a tremendous amount of time writing for this blog. Some weeks it's hard to get anything else done because I have to get the words out before I can do anything else. What I write on this blog is what's in my head anyway. It's always there. Every day new streams of thought. New paths in old themes. I used to write it in my journals. hundreds of notebooks. The blog has become an incredible tool for me. It's made me disciplined about the writing. It's made me hold my every ramble to higher standard than when I wrote it into my notebooks. My notebooks were what I thought of as raw material for tooling later. I always thought I would go back, glean the good bits and expand on them. But going back is usually painful for me and depressing.
It isn't so much that I have to make time for writing, it's more that I have to make time for everything else.
We watched the Leonard Cohen documentary "I'm your man". There were some pretty strange and unpleasant covers of Leonard's songs, but there were about five songs that were so moving we had to play each of them thirty two times into the morning hours, drinking more beer and being awed by Cohen's skill, his humility, his humor, and just...him. We have loved Cohen for a long time and have many of his albums. Like Bowie, Cohen has been a major part of the soundtrack to our lives. There is literally no other person on earth who can talk about a blow job in a song and make you weep for the beauty of it. Bukowski sure can't do that. When Bukowski mentions blow jobs it makes me want to die a little.
I am buzzing with things to say and none of it will come out sounding coherent. The thoughts are coming too fast to make you see the sense of them. So I'll just have to wait.
A number of people (friends and family included) have wondered how I can post something to this blog every single day. Sometimes twice. Where do I find the time? How do I have time to do anything else? I was talking about this with my mom as we headed to Portland to drive around
I think most artists and writers will understand me when I say that I write every single day because I have to. I know they'll understand, because most of them say the same thing themselves. I write because it's as important to me as breathing. I can't NOT write. There have been periods where I wrote irregularly for a few months. Those periods are very dark for me. It feels like suffocating.
This morning I was remembering when I was twenty three, I spent so much time writing poetry and taking it very seriously. I agonized over whether or not I had a right to call myself a writer or more importantly; a poet. Does one have to be good at something to consider themselves a part of it? At what point does a person who writes a bit of poetry become a poet? I agonized because I had written hundreds of poems by this point in my life and I knew that ninety nine percent of them were complete crap. I could feel it in my bones. I knew what I was trying for, what I wanted my words to do, and I couldn't get there. It embarrassed me to tell people that I was poet because I didn't feel worthy.
Then one evening I was looking out over Sutter Street flicker on in the dusk, trying to distill the light into words. Poetry is as much a way of interpreting the way you see the world as it is the art of words themselves. I am always reframing sensory information into a kind of mental shorthand in which two words can stand in place of fifty to describe something. If your brain works this way and in doing it you have a constant hunger to get it out of your head, then you are a poet.
That was it. I may never have a published poem, but I never again questioned myself. Let others do it. Not me. I know others ask themselves similar questions. Artists wonder "If I don't sell any art, am I really an artist? Or am I just a person making art?" What makes a person legitimate? Is it commerce? Is it when other people give you the appellation? Do you have to be good? Who decides if you're good, or good enough?
It's all a question of who you really are. You're an artist if you have to make art. If, even when you hate everything you make, you still do it because if you don't you feel you might die, then you're an artist. If you are compelled to pick up a pen every day because not doing it would make you feel weighted down with a thousand unexpressed words, then you are a writer.
I do spend a tremendous amount of time writing for this blog. Some weeks it's hard to get anything else done because I have to get the words out before I can do anything else. What I write on this blog is what's in my head anyway. It's always there. Every day new streams of thought. New paths in old themes. I used to write it in my journals. hundreds of notebooks. The blog has become an incredible tool for me. It's made me disciplined about the writing. It's made me hold my every ramble to higher standard than when I wrote it into my notebooks. My notebooks were what I thought of as raw material for tooling later. I always thought I would go back, glean the good bits and expand on them. But going back is usually painful for me and depressing.
It isn't so much that I have to make time for writing, it's more that I have to make time for everything else.
Labels: Leonard Cohen, poetry, writing