post-writing is local

frankly, i don't know what i mean by that title for this ramble. it has to do with something about all writing is local even if it is decentered on the web or even if you write in a language you speak with an accent. writing is local. but chalk up my inaccuracies to an exhaustion i've not felt in some time. a good kind of tired, almost as if i'm high with a mellow buzz.

because i just returned from my reading. hard to tell whether it was a success or not but i certainly enjoyed doing it. the other two readers, crawdad nelson and miles miniaci, are very different with distinct styles and subject matter, but i think the whole worked well. and the band quite literally rocked.

but why i think of writing as a local endeavour is because tho i've lived in this town all my life and am not shy about publishing at all some of the people i met tonight were surprised that i live here. i suppose it's kinda sweet really to be mistaken for a writer on tour. one young woman quite literally did a double-take when she was talking to me about my being a local guy. chalk that up to my not going to many readings and that my style of reading and my subject matter do not fit any readily available definition [i'm just guessing about this anyway but it seems to corroborate what i've heard before] of the kinds of poetry found in the two main local venues for public readings.

okay, i'm tired and rambling. i suppose what i want to say is that my own definition of myself is that of an unknown, international, local poet. and ain't we all? really we are. i think that is in wcw's 'patterson' as a letter from a young ginsberg when ginsberg introduced himself to williams as a young unkown poet to an older unknown poet. i throw in the international because frankly i think that because of the borderless internet and the fact that many of my closest poet friends live 1000s of miles from me.

i'm not gonna correct or spell-check this post. let it sit as the post-reading ramblings of a very tired, but satiated, local, unknown, international poet who doesn't give a shit about self-promotion or literary immortality yet loves poetry to his very marrow.

as a post-script part of my emotional state is tempered by the fact that i am going to a funeral tomorrow and must get up very early and drive to fresno, which is a city just above l.a., for it. the wife of a co-worker died on friday from liver failure following surgery to remove a tumor from her liver because of advancing renal cancer that had spread. she was in her early 40s with two small children. she was diagnosed two weeks ago.