What I like about writing, either poetry or the essay, is that I don’t have to make sense. The writing makes sense on its own. The writing begins to make sense as I write, more as an impressionistic whole, a tone, a leit-motif if you will, which takes over the poem, or the essay. I remember watching a program on PBS about birth. When the millions of sperm finally end their race to the egg, as soon as one sperm comes in contact with the egg, the egg is transformed into an impenetrable barrier that all the loser sperm cannot breach. I see the same transformation happen as I write. I have one sentence down, which makes me think of another, and that second sentence then collapses all the other possible pathways the first sentence could have engendered, while simultaneously opening a myriad of new rabbit holes down which I can fall. Writing like this is exciting. As I progress, re-reading as I go, or rather as I become lost, I start to see that I am not lost. One can never be lost if one does not know where one is going, I guess. There is not a straight linear progress, but it still has a form, more like the orgasmic organic transformations of the earth as the tectonic plates grind into one another, where the musings, thoughts of the writer reflexively bend back and out, an Escher-like reflowing; connections made where none were seen, imagistic moves, themed turns, poetic leaps down the trail of thought: Art.
(October 6, 2013)
