ron silliman's post today about community hit home. since i'm a rather shy guy, which sounds odd if you've met me cuz i usually can't shut the fuck up and i'm loud to boot, community i find very important. as i've mentioned a couple of days ago, i don't believe in literary immortality, and if immortality is the fuel that drives yr engine i'd suggest you seek it without using poetry, since it is a near-oxymoron: a famous poet. fame to whom?

writing/reading are part of living, and tho i concede there are famous poets [i'd shit my pants if i ever had the opportunity to meet ed dorn, for example] i do not think that anything lasts. that is not nihilism, but the fact that it is our fight against entropy that is the matter. and entropy will eventually win. that does not mean at all that i consider the poems of dead poets dead as well. rimbaud is alive to me still to this day. so is catullus and villon and marlowe and cavafy.

guess i'm rambling here. poetry is part of life, of living, and if we're lucky we become the texts we compose when we die. for ever? no. but as long as human life is.

community, a few, or few hundred, friends in the art matters. even in my shyness, i value it greatly. i've not been to many readings since nicholas was born, only because i'm a new father and love being home with him and anna. so there is the internet, blogs and email. and i'm not shy here.

a community of isolates, and yes, most of us poets value our isolation, our alone time, we are solitary creatures by nature and habit. perhaps that is why we value language, why i love language so.

often i feel guilty for not calling, for not writing soon enough. perhaps, that is part of the condition of writing, taking it all on, humbly arrogating the tasks of our human language. if that is so, i'm in deep.