Hi Paula! Thank you for perservering, and for your thorough attempt to explain your lostness. You've actually connected to the heart of the poem in your lostness. I think the so-called 'speaker' of the poem is exploring a feeling of lostness. Actually, I look to lose myself through writing poems. 'Get lost' is practically a motto of mine. It's the solution to the need for anwers or explanations.
You indentify a gamut of feeling from fear to hope to exuberance, and yes! These are all in the swirl! Jim used the word that comes to my mind for this method: "kaleidoscope-like". I think that's how my 'mind' works; kaleidoscopically.
I hope that a reader can turn the poem one way . . . turn it the other way, and see something different. And try to hold it so that neither vision dominates.
I suppose, for me, a poem is not a puzzle to solve. Clarity is not synonymous with solution. My task as a poet is to write absolutely clearly about what happens when words utterly fail.
The impulse behind my work is not thought or ideas, but lyric.
I truly believe that poems begin where thought ends.
I think that wanting to have something to say is deadly to poetry.
When we simply can't speak anymore, that's what poetry is for. This is where it begins. The compulsion is some inner music.
I'm always riding the shift—shift of focus, shift of structure, shift between phrases, shift between lines.
I'm feeling for the same constantly shifting currents and cross currents I find in the physical world. I love the sound of two words clashing.
I'm an associative thinker rather than a logical one.
And I know that the poem is not the words. The poem happens in the spaces, where the words are not, but their sounds continue to resonate and weave.
I'm trying to make resonance, not meaning in any literal sense.
Poetic language undermines surface language. Poetry is under-mining. At its best, forces from deep within are released by a lyric necessity. I'm constantly trying to break out of my own life into life itself.
The hoped-for result is nothing less than transformation.
And none of this is to say that this particular poem succeeds. I don't know if it does. I may never know.
I'm not even sure if the poem is what it wants to be yet. I rarely feel satisfied with a finished feeling.
Please don't feel bad!! Never feel bad if you don't like a poem. Not all styles are for all readers!! Read another poem!
Actually, you read so much into the poem that's wonderful, and ALL there! Maybe you're looking for a resolution, for all the feelings to bind together. But I can't pull them into a manageable shape. Too many contradictions and tensions. And the moment I try to be sure and secure, a big wind and another shift. Nothing stays still.
What you've given me in your reading has been enormously helpful. I am so grateful for your time!!
Hi Nick! Hope you're well! No book.
Hi Yves!!! YES. The poetry is in the spaces. YES. And "Phrasing, phrasing, it's all about phrasing". This is something I say all the time!! I write in phrases, with embodied emboldened silences inbetween . . . THANK YOU!!
I'm still swimming around this one. Nothing settled yet . . . I love this state!! Will let you know if anything happens!
Cally
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