docu poetics

i've had the past couple days off work.  that allowed me to do some things around the house, and a little yard work in between rain storms.  & it is has been very stormy in northern california this year.  just as the climate models predicted: very dry years married to very wet years.  the normal is gone.  indeed, but i love cold stormy nights.  i have the windows open as i type this.  the air is chilly.  the wind is picking up.  & there is a soft, vegetal, smell of the soon-to-be-rain.

well, then anyway, i feel guilty.  i need to write my love & gratitude to a few friends who have sent me their work, their love & their support in this crazy endeavour of life & poetry.  so forgive.  i'll do what i can when i can.  as the poet james dickey wrote, 'my life is made of the world.  i will do what i can.'

but what is this 'docu poetics' i write about?  well, it turns out that i think that documentary poetry might just be my life's work.  let me briefly explain.  anna & i were in oakland for a concert last weekend.  we saw the wonderful band beirut [i paused writing this note to watch the live performance i've linked to.  anna & i fell in love with the singer's beautiful, deep, clear & melancholy tones, & i really dig how the band brings brass horns into the front of their sound] at the indelible fox theater on telegraph ave.  i love this venue.  once it was a grand movie palace that fell into neglect & disrepair in the early 1970s but it was loved back to health and reopened as a music venue in 2009.  anna & i saw the shins perform two months after the theater's grand opening.

we had a marvelous weekend.  we stayed at the marriott hotel on broadway which was a short walk to the fox.  but then so, i started thinking about oakland as a city of poets.  i know there are a number of artists & writers who moved to the city in the early 2000s when rents shot skyhigh in the city by the bay.  in the early days of digital poetics, i.e. blogs, a number of very good writers living in oakland were doing their bloggy thing.  so as i was walking the streets of downtown oakland on saturday night i began to think of oakland poets & poetries.

well and but so, yesterday i googled a poet who i lost track of.  the work, i mean.  & i came across my own blog in 2008.  i started reading my entries, now 11 years old.  & it hit me with all the blunt force trauma of a 2 x 4 across the bridge of my nose.  my life's poetics is a kind of documentary poetry.  i've been doing it all along.  i use my blog as my publishing tool.  well, duh, as i might say.  but that would make sense since many of the poets i admire, beginning with constantine cavafy to james schuyer to jim mccrary to nicanor parra have all been, at least some time in their life in poetry, self-publishers, journal poets, but whatever label i can stick to my heroes in the art, they are all poets who did their own thing regardless of fashion.

& if my list of heroes don't meet the regular standard of docu poets, so what.  it's my list.  i can define it as i wish.  my work as a poet is not to advance a career nor get prizes.  it is to record my amazement at being alive during the short time i have on earth.  & i mean the whole damn thing.  i'll want to still go the old fashioned route & publish a few more chaps, a book or two, before i shuffle off this mortal coil.  because i love paper & the printed word.  but poetry is larger than those things.  it always has been.  it can survive, nee thrive, in the digital screens too.

but what i want to keep doing is writing & publishing my notes, poems, rants, & reviews when i want at the time i want.  it is my own duchampian anti-poetry, the documents of my life.  & i hope, even if my life is boring as fuck, it is a life fully lived.