Letters to Myself

What must be kept is the experience of encountering these things. The how we got to reading this stuff -- even if it were merely following the cue or off-hand remark or a footnote smuggled into a commentary on something else.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

I remember HIM -- not Olson of course -- but little impy HIM -- batik shirts and open toe sandels, hair curling and glasses immense. Twiddling tabacco. smoking out the window. Always talking about Projective Verse and de-territorializing machines. Turned onto a huge BIG BOOK by the throwaway remarks of a mad Irish man.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

Dominating the cover -- a giant of a man. Hand reaching to his lips. Cigarette poised for a BREATH of the noxious weed. Old man now. But still a big man -- powerfully built.

Other Books -- Call Me Ishmael -- a condensed study a real densely packed study of Melville, his material world and what made the WHALE.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

Sprawls. Is too large to carry or read unobstrusively. Perhaps that's what THIS reading is supposed to be. Utterly large, utterly performed.

Letter One -- I Maximus to You

I can only make out the LOCAL -- the Birds build with straw -- as a poem is built with syllables. One tiny bit at a time. But the Local is smeared in the excesses of a consumerist age. Advertisements are the noise. The Local is the National is the Cultural:

(o Gloucester-man,
weave
your birds and fingers
new, your roof-tops,
clean shit upon racks
sunned on American
braid
with others like you, such
extricable surface
as faun and oral,
satyr lesbos vase

o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)
( MP 8)

To braid -- is not to weave. A braid retains the complexity of each strand, doesn't dissociate the MATTER into particular atoms. A ROUGH putting together, holding together -- a putting together where the mismatch or the texture is the pattern. So with the world / the universe(!), he writes -- the local.

Letters to Myself

Ammiel's class on Thursday brought me back. He brought the whole class back. He wanted everyone to talk about "How you ended up here?", wanted us to talk about how we came to poetry and perhaps why we wanted to read the stuff that he's so thick into. I didn't say much except for turning to the Beats as a 17 year old Singaporean, an experience that many in the class shared despite the vast cultural differences. A fuller memory of poetry --

Sy -- self-designated poet of the class, in both languages. I remember him writing a tortured Sonnet about angels and tombstones while I flippantly copied a Wordsworth rhyme. Got me to thinking about the lengths individuals would go in forming an identity in poetry.

Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and the Beats. In the strange corners of the National Library, sudden discoveries. Along with the metaphysical poets -- strange companions. But liberating. Perhaps I was attracted to the psychadelic hardcover design of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

I remember how poetry and the Beats almost saved somebody's life. 17 and with no place to go, trying to start out again after being on Probation, he turned to the books without the grammar. He starting writing without the rules. I would sit with him, hours late into the Teck Hin night, listening to him, listening to myself. We read Kerouac together, Marvell too, Herman Hesse and of course, Shakespeare. The only person whose ever asked me to read out loud cause he liked the sound of my pseudo TS Eliot voice.

And I remain intimidated by the notion of the poetic. I remain desiring to read BIG BOOKS whose meanings need to be teased, pried open, hunted out. I still sit -- reading LINES out aloud. LINES that don't make sense but play with my sense of how words should sound, put together in a line. And I remain awkward, hesitant, shy, afraid, diffident around the company of poets -- self-proclaimed or not. In a strange way, perennially outside.