[David Mason]

I wish I could say this on all the "younger poets" threads I've followed here, but I'm so grateful to know each of you and think you're doing marvelous work. I genuinely love the oblique, the angular, which I see in many of the best poets. Coleridge can write perfect blank verse in "Frost at Midnight" and then can give us "Kubla Khan," and both poems astonish and sustain me. I think these young poets are pitching themselves into the right conversations--form, content, the whole kiboodle. How do you spell kiboodle?

Bless em.

Dave

[Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Andrew-- thanks! RE audio: MiPoesias had some audio up awhile back and while I've mislaid the url, a quick google shows me I'm on the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/JillAlexanderEssbaum. Try that?

Where am I going next? Well, I have a manuscript that's completed and I'm just kind of sitting on it, waiting. That's probably not the most direct route to publishing, but I find things turn out better if I wait for them. Also, I'm working on a novel.

I have a long narrative poem in blank verse that I will finish one of these years-- it calls me back to it often-- though I am in no hard rush. Also, I am writing puns. I gave myself a goal to write 500 puns in a year starting in June. I'm well behind, but it's coming along.

As far as subjects I'd like to treat, I'm thinking about the Reformation, specifically through the eyes of Katharina von Bora-- Katie Luther. I'm also interested in extreme weather. Poems that take their central conceits from examples of extreme weather might make for a nice chapbook. Speaking of chapbooks-- I have one coming out from Cooper Dillon books in a few weeks that's highly experimental and very sonic at the same time. It's called The Devastation and it's a single poem. I'm grateful they're doing it.

[Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Dave-- you make us blush!

I think, perhaps, it's caboodle? But spelling ain't at the top of my list of skills...

[David Mason]

I think it's kaboodle... My noodle can't make much of anything this morning.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Jill, I've read lots of you now since I started a web-sweep after you first appeared here. You are terrific and prolific - and those two don't often marry well! Indeed, you are Jill the Astonishing!

Your poems show a sense of fearlessness. Courage. I mean, you go where angels fear to. I'm still at the stage where I'm trying to kill my angels, I think - that's what you're showing me about myself. Are you afraid of anything? Either when you write or in your life? And if not, where you ever? This might not seem a poetry question, but it is to me. One of the big ones for me.

I hope this isn't unanswerable.

Thanks for EVERYTHING, Jill.

Cally

[Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Cally--

Oh, Lawdy. I'm most certainly not fearless in my off-the-page life! I'm terrified of death. I have a deep terror of God, and not, I don't think, the fear that one's supposed to have, the awe and holy trembling. I'm afraid of riding out the rest of my years alone. I fear (don't laugh!) sleep. I fear getting sick.

You know, I call these 'fears' but they are probably more rightly _panics_. Panic is noisier, and hyperbolic. It's less true, you know? It's a smokescreen. It keeps you a little unaware of real fears. Or, it does me.

But: I don't fear saying things that are on my mind and heart. Not. At. All. If we lived nearby and hung out, you'd fast learn that I don't have a good verbal filter-- if I think it, it's really difficult for me to keep from saying it! Or: write it. I suppose that's where the structure of form is at its most useful and attractive to me-- because we simply can't just put something on the page and call it art. I endorse experimentalism wholeheartedly, but not experimentation without craft. The form or the idea of the form is the pen to keep my wild stallions in their pasture. It's the casing on the sausage. (THAT is a terrible metaphor! I'm sorry!)

So when in my off-the-page life, when shit hits the fan, the first thing I do is make a list, create a plan-- and then go forward. A list, a plan is a form. And for me, it works. Likewise, putting a poem into a shape. Ack, I'm kinda afraid this is a crappy answer (and don't hesitate to hold my feets to the fires), but it's all about structure. It doesn't have to be a perfectly geometric structure, but those lines have to live in some kind of a house.

Is this helpful???

[Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Cally--

I left something off the list. Whenever I hit a bump or a glitch in the writing, whenever I have writers' block-- I worry / panic / fear that I'm done. That the words will never come back again. That's a true terror. For, what would any of us be if we couldn't do well the thing that made us _us_ anymore? Ack, that's a scary one.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Brilliant helpful.

Well - since sleep and death are brothers, fear one fear the other! I love how Plato said 'Fear is the beginning of wisdom' - imagine what a wise-guy you'll be in years to come if you keep reaping the fears like you are now! I know just what you mean about the panic thing - I love going manic, too, and it's all histrionics - keeping the real fear down, or like a release from the pressures. It sounds to me like the fears are your energy, not your enemy.

The verbal filter - yes - you've kissed the Blarney stone. And it's true - your verbal energy, your word-coining power, is so well contained by form.
What you say about structure keeping the wild horses in - that's so good.

In fact, what you've said about structure reminds me so much of Blake, and what he wrote about 'the bounding line'.

"The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art ...Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself;... all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist"

So, when chaos comes again, the poetic line - distinct and defining - actually allows the chaos to survive, rather than destroy you, or suck you into it. Structure in poetry is like reins on the horse. Doesn't kill the horse, let's you ride the horse.

I always loved the 'bounding line' cos it means making discrete, defining - like borders and boundaries do - but it also means leaping about full of energy!

So writing a poem for you must be like overflowing and containing at the same time. Like standing at a fountain or a waterfall with a bucket. Yes. That's how it is for me. Only I don't have the balance right like you do - too contained still. But you have really inspired me, shown me a way. Honestly. I won't forget this.

So much more could be said! I'm just so glad you exist.

p.s. YES to what you added to the list. My greatest horror is a stroke - one that would affect the verbal centre of the brain. The only thing I'm truly afraid of now is unlived lines. I want to live all my lines before I die. I don't want to die with unlived lines! That's my truly scary one.

pps - So, what do you DO when you hit a bump, when you hit the block? Any strategies? Or just panic??!!!

[Carol Trese]

Hello Jill,
How very cool it is to be exposed to your work! I won the poetry lotto, finding your work and exploring it!

I find truth in the human body. I am interested in how the church has said this is Bad, they continue and they have been saying it for centuries now. Don't talk from your body! I am curious about how folks respond to your work. How do you fight this "badness"? I know my young-adult daughter would still be embarrassed by the way you are right out there in speaking of sexuality and the human experience of the body.

I want to expose my daughter (and myself) to poets like you who speak from this positive space of body knowledge. Who do you find that speaks from this place? I would love to hear your favorite poets.

You said: "God, sex, death. Anything worthwhile I've ever thought or said will be about those things."

Yes, of course, that is what all writers say, but what interests me is how you meld your own personal spirituality with your life in your work.

Ms. Jill--what a delight to be exposed to your work. I am grateful for this space to converse with you.

++ Carol

[Mark Allinson]

I am interested in how the church has said this is Bad, they continue and they have been saying it for centuries now.

That's so true, Carol. And it is (and will be) true of all "spiritual" philosophies, and not just the religious forms either, but also the current popular social philosophies: the body is the enemy.

As I said earlier, I think one of the true roles of poetry is to affirm the body. I don't think the importance of this aspect of poetry should be underestimated. To me it is a question of social sanity, that the body receives its due in art.

One of the sources of high poetic valuation of the body is a poet not much read these days, Walt Whitman, and here is D.H.Lawrence's view on this aspect of his work:


Now Whitman was a great moralist. He was a great leader. He was a great changer of the blood in the veins of men ...

Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something 'superior' and 'above' the flesh. Even Emerson still maintained this tiresome 'superiority' of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it. Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds.

'There ! ' he said to the soul. 'Stay there!'

Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh, Soul, where you belong.

Stay in the dark limbs of negroes. Stay in the body of the prostitute. Stay in the sick flesh of the syphilitic. Stay in the marsh where the calamus grows. Stay there, Soul, where you belong.

==========

For me, true religious experience comes from a total acceptance of the body and its infirmities and limitations, not from a spiritual flight of the mind up and away from the body. This is how I read Christ's incarnation and death - and resurrection.

O.K. rant over - I will keep off Jill's thread from here on.