"Baroque" then "post--"

When it comes to what I'm trying to say and how I say it there are two different me's working. This is why, after talking with Meghan last night, I find myself so lost in this process, where a few months ago I was so certain. So not two different me's, but a me in a transitional space, trying to veer away from the space of the last project into the language of the new one, one that strips down the world in a way where I have to confront myself and my role and the world. Plus all the confusion of other daily life, which is another shedding/stripping.

So enough about me and my personal problems. I awoke this morning to absence. Not the being alone, but the expectation of something being there that wasn't. This is, perhaps, at the heart of my thesis journey: how to exist in a place, how to fill the absence with its own regressive absence, whether in the visual or textual or combination of both. So I turned to Robert Creeley's poem "Nothing New," which is sort of his farewell advice to young poets, and a sharing of what he has learned or not learned of the world. I give you this:

"I like, rather am caught by, that sense of history
deliquescing, becoming commentary on its own agencies of
recording, a schizophrenically dividing pattern of multiple --
realities, all contesting, all "right" from their own demanding
perspectives. A friend spoke of the hermeneutical phase of
history, that stage where it becomes the study of its own
meaning. And then the baroque, and then the post--."

Then, for some reason, I was struck again by Grenier's statement "I HATE SPEECH" which both is pertinent to and in contrast of the current state of affairs in what I termed "The Post-Gutenberg" world we live in.

Most of my interactions with people, the important people in my life, come through text. Whether it be phone text messaging or e-mail, facebook, etc. But most importantly I try to communicate my version of my truth through poetry. Generally my face-to-face interactions are with folks I know either nothing of or marginally, and this expounds a certain freedom, but more generally a distinct restriction. When I try to speak, to be honest in speech, I am never given the opportunity to because of peoples consistent waiting to speak themselves. This is why poetry is, for me, my most valid form of communication. Perhaps this is too personal or whatever for a open web-site, but I guess the honesty in text is the only choice I feel I've been given. Which leads me to the fact that I've been chasing the goal, searching for what I'm not actually interested in. So, while I go try to find that, I'll leave this poem and the basic thesis statement and let you guys decide if I have room for these thoughts to grow:


A moment of taste. Words
on tongue, like late night moonlight and ocean
where reflection meets itself on dark horizons.

Because we are not outside of being:
These words: little ways.
There is nothing else.

Why look for existence?
In the sky a point.
And then the sun.

You and I.
You and I.

III.

Everything has changed.

IV

Writing is the post-condition of a moment.
Composition is an extraction of simplicity.
When you read this a gap will form.
I can only concern myself with my particular forms of diminishment and project
them on to you. That is why you read with interest. Words are a reflection of the self.
The act of writing does not differ from the act of war.
The moments in which one becomes fantastically scarred are the moments I am
concerned with.
The moments of great yearning.
It has nothing to do with death because it has everything to do with death.
Each new poem my possible last words.
Every time I write I start with an emotional distance then try to close that gap. Fill
the emptiness.
The word, the image, has everything to do with the thing itself. Otherwise it would
be something entirely different.
Every argument its own concept.

"Precision is a mask that imprisons an object in a set form. Only through imprecision does an object become free and able to be seen. Abstraction is imprecision."