bummed out seems to be one of the constants of a writing / reading life. bummed that one isn't doing enough for friends and loved ones. bummed because no matter how long we live we'll never finish the life's work. bummed because the length of life, even at a hundred years, is never long enough to read everything. bummed because we want to be that ideal reader. bummed because we want that ideal reader.

and but so, bummed is part of the job description. especially if one dedicates his / her life to poetry. who the fuck reads that shit?! it ain't a job, ain't a vocation, but an obsession. and so we discipline our lives to an art that many don't even think about. what joy is there to be taken from such discipline?

can't answer that with a pithy line, or an ironic, hipster-doofus, sentence. it is worth it, i say. so much depends on it, including the health of the art. i recall several instances where i go into my language-unified-like-a-jedi knight's force theory since language is what binds and penetrates us. most people have that look like rich is off on it again: back slowly away. but it is the problem of humanity, words, grammar and syntax, that can be manipulated and stretched by lies. but it is where our soul, and where the physical heart sits. there is nothing but words, and the investigations we make of words, whether in pure sound, vispo, prose, or lineated text.

bummed because it is an impossible endeavor. and if your a writer of a certain bent, it is the only work worth a life, a love, in all their manifold meanings. i recall reading that dylan thomas's poetry was obsessed with "sex, death and the sound of words." there is joy in the madness, faith in the poison, as rimbaud would have it.

three things: working on my sixth cold this season. nicholas is in daycare five days a week, and small children are nothing if not petri dishes cooking up all kinds of microbial life-forms. i think i quite seriously hacked up part of my lungs. and today's mail brought the latest fuck! and a batch of pubs and chaps from the poet jon cone. and tom beckett has posted his latest interviews with mark young and jean vengua at e-values. only the last two make me very happy, but all three make me delirious.

lee thorn of fuck! awarded his second annual creative accomplishment prize to jon cone. here is the citation.

for his FUSSINESS. Fussiness doesn't work for all artists. Kerouac was terrified by his own fussiness. For Jon, fussiness translates to more work, and more work ends in poems that convey a satisfying sense of aesthetic inevitability.

cone sent a treasure-trove of diy and small-press publications including two of his chaps. fucking great! i aspire to publish like this.

word to yo momma