no music

who was it that said, 'all art aspires to the condition of music'? perhaps so. esp. for poetry. but for me i've long not wanted for music in my writing. maybe it's because i grew up reading a whole lot of translated writings, from polish, french, german, you name it. i even went thru a period of reading the british martian poets, e.g. craig raine and christopher reid, because they were writing out of a translatese. and one book i'd been obsessed with, reading it obsessively, is doubled-flowering: from the notebooks of araki yasusada [roof book, 1997] because it is a fictive poet writing directly in english from an elsewhere of the japanese language.

instead of aspiring to music in my writing i turn to the cinema. images and editing techniques matter more to me. not that i don't love music. anna and i have rediscovered music and have returned to attending shows. there's some really great indie music, or is it musics, happening now. punk rock not only informed my sensibilities but changed my life. but i want a kind of writing that is not so dependent on sound. i want a translatable kind of text. not that i think i'm very successful in writing the sort of texts that i think rock, like the yasusada poems.

doesn't mean i'll stop trying. besides, movies have mattered much more in my life. when i was 16 years old i knew i wanted to be a writer. when i was 18 i discovered poetry. then i got sick. when i started to regain my health i was well on my way towards poetry as a way of life. when i returned to school i re-found the cinema and took as many film classes as i could. when i look back on it i probably would've majored in film studies rather than english. not because i wanted or want to be a filmmaker -- even if i harbor the dream of making my own crappy low-budget horror film, just for the fun of it -- but because i want to learn the techniques of filmmaking for use in my own writing.

the path of poetry was already set but i've always been a terrible student. i make mistakes and fumble. perhaps that's why i aspire to a cinema based writing that details editing-sense over sound-sense and makes awkwardness part of the aesthetic. maybe it's still the punk in me that thinks anyone can do this as long as you have the desire and the need to pick up pen or keyboard and create with a level of generosity and love of the art.