but seriously folks

without meaning to sound like shecky greene it would seem that my last couple of posts perhaps sound a bit bitter. perhaps, but the joke about poor seamus i find somehow enlightening and damn funny. it is a proof that no one is above a bit of humility and wonder. that there are things much bigger than we are.

well, as the kids like to remind us: NO DOY!!!!

for a few reasons, some too personal to state publicly, there's been more than a fair share of stress at the moment. what i find fascinating in my life is how poetry is the engine that drives much of my thinking. for better and for worse. e.g. working in the garden and mowing the grass today i found myself thinking of various poetics, my reading practices, how i'd classify myself as a writer even tho i hate systems of classifications.

all this relates somehow to how i live my life. poetry and life are indeed separate entities but i am reminded by what the swedish mystical poet tomas transtromer once snapped at an interviewer. transtromer, a clinical psychologist, wondered why he is always asked how his job influenced his writing but no one ever asked him how his poetry transformed his job.

in other words, the inner life nearly always impacts the outer life. even stevens' suitcase, partitioned as it was by sections for his day job and for drafts of poems, is still one suitcase. here i am as a family man with a mortgage cutting my lawn and thinking of, for lack of a better phrase, my poetics. and i am reminded by the lines of british poet martin stannard on why i love poetry so and how my own poetics seem to be evolving toward i don't know what:

If poems can't slug it out
with kids and mayhem and shopping life
overdrafts and broken cars and jobs
they're not worth shit

['parried endlessly', writing down the days, stride books 2001]