Non-stop Romance
Saturday, 18. September 2010
I dreamed I was collecting feathers in something like a garbage dump
Small, grey, and fluffy pigeon feathers
Left over from a cat-attack
A tomcat, no, a puma, no, “a mountain lion!”
They got bigger as I went along
The feathers– hawks, grey hawks
I followed their trail, and they got bigger
Until they were eagle feathers,
Black and greasy and long as my forearm
I cleaned them up as I went along and made them nice again
But I understand: poems are stupid places to put one’s dreams.
Saturday, 18. September 2010 at 1:41 pm
I don’t mind spelling it out: to romance used to mean to tell lies, pretend with intent to deceive.
I believe this dream represented the last year of my life, spent trying to adjust to, adapt to, modify, cope with, continue searching for something bigger, more symbolic, valuable, in such romance; the inability to fully ignore environment and context (and the unseen, but understood, violence behind it all); the futility of trying to clean up after it; the unwillingness to create poetry about it: to elevate, romanticise– lie about it. The last line is a sort of apology, both that I did once turn some hopeful feelings into an excessively romantic sort of poem, which I now feel was prematurely recorded, and that also it’s a tremendous cop-out to write a poem about a dream (and how boring of me to tell other people about a dream I had last night–ugh!). But there it is, this is what I’ve been reduced to.
Monday, 1. November 2010 at 10:28 pm
/”…poems are stupid places to put one’s dreams.”
Would we even know who Coleridge was if that was true?
Tuesday, 7. December 2010 at 6:27 pm
The poem espouses two significations of dream: Dream as that which happends in states of unwakefulness, while we sleep, and dreams as hopes we have for the future.
The colour grey keep appearing — first to describe feathers of pigeons, then of hawks. However, as the feathers grow their colours change: Eagles have black feathers here, in this poem.
The material, visual memory of war (allegorically doubled by the presence of the tomcat — a kind of weapon for warfare, a mountain lion: an echo from the ongoing conflickt in the mountains of Asia?) are subdued and repressed. They are remembered in the form of grease and in the darkness that lays claim to the eagle feathers.
The poet has repressed the physical evidence of pigeons fighting cats but is unable to deny the remnans of dirty war that has left its trail on the majestic birds observing the scene: The writer wishes to “clean them up”; to wipe away the remnants of a human disaster of unfathomable magnitude, almost not-present in the text It is a remnant of the Real: The poet wishes to wash it away — its claims too costly to comply with.
Thence also the retrat into romance: Poems are kinds of loci (places) that are ineffable in a very physical sense: They can never exhaust their own signification, but always depend on readers to be put together (right). As such, poems are stupid. It is the reader that brings signification and life to the text. It is _this_ that the poet understands.
Sunday, 19. December 2010 at 10:52 pm
And that, folks, is the man I almost married, ie, almost spent the rest of my life with, ie, would have never grown tired of thinking with and talking to. whoa.
You totally made my narcissistic day, I love your comment. Do it again, do it again!
I still heart you too, Joseph, aka Mr. Supportive. You’re a peach