I have a secret life
that even I don't know about yet.


-Kenny

Tuesday

George Oppen was goodlooking when he was young and badass when he got old

Here is a link to hear george oppen reading.

When I record poems onto tape I try to be in a room, or create, similar reverb to that of george oppens recorded readings. I love the echoey room that feels large. It makes the words last longer in a good way. One time I was in a reading of Billy Collins and I was so bored, and that made the words last long in a bad way. All I can remember is that he talked about geese and I was sitting next to a pretty girl while he talked about his dog chasing geese.

Back to george. fuck off billy. George's poems were discrete and serial. He loved the fracture. I remember reading the discrete series and focusing on the fact that a discrete series in math is when one number depends on the previous number to exist in the series. The poem is like that, the words depend on one another. I learned alot reading that poem and it has had a huge effect on the way I write. Sometimes I get too caught up in the letting go of the long previous and too dependent on the immediate past. This is a problem that is pervasive in more than just my poetry. But I don't blame that on the discrete series.

I love a writer that stops writing for a while, during trauma. Oppen was exiled at one point and stopped writing for almost twenty years. Then he continued to write later in life. He was in political limbo and his poetry will always be looked at through a political lens, for good or bad, because of it. I don't read oppen politically. I think this helps me read his writing. It is less about something and more ethereal. More about the shortcomings of the world at large, than the political shortcomings of the few with feet in doors.

A line I will always remember by oppen is 'the dirty feet' it is in a poem about a homeless child in the street. i think there is something about faces in there too. i will find it.

When I started writing I found out that I like to have an image base from which to associate. In the beginning, for about seven years, it was on a piece of cardboard next to a dumpster in an alley across the street from a movie theater. Lately, it has changed to a supermarket parking lot next to a field. the latest is more expansive and detailed. I credit the first to oppen influence, not the associations of my physical surroundings, that is why the first is less detailed than the second. The second comes from something I often see and feel quiet emotions within.

3 comments:

  1. "I don't read oppen politically. I think this helps me read his writing. It is less about something and more ethereal. More about the shortcomings of the world at large, than the political shortcomings of the few with feet in doors."

    Wonderfully put.

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  2. Ken, I thought you might dig these:

    http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Narrow-House.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. thanks justin, these are really great. your site is awesome too. you are growing links, my friend.

    ReplyDelete