The knife is game.
The heart insists.
The board is receptive,
All of this is subject to editing.
All of this may be deleted within seconds.
All of this is just another attempt
To improve his aim.
Practice makes perfect.
What is the poet doing, throwing a knife at a heart shaped target in the chest of the outline of a man on a board behind a barn. This flies in the face of my image of the poet as someone writing in a coffee shop or cafe or surrounded by books and letters in a disheveled private library or a public library or scrawling the first draft of a poem on a scrap of paper while walking along in a city or perhaps a rural setting or on a bus or train or plane. Well, if not writing then reflecting, transforming thought and feelings into metaphor, channeling whatever we mean by poetic energy into experiments with language as a free service to their culture, breathing life into language so it doesn't die on a website or in a one-time speech or on someone's lips to nobody in particular at a bar or camouflaged by cliches in the lyrics of a song.
Why is this poet throwing knives at a board?
Maybe it's because he doesn't know what else to do. Writing poems, posting and publishing, reading those poems, sharing with a friend, used to be enough. It used to satisfy some deep need to be seen or heard or, dare I say, remembered?
This could happen in any profession. It could happen to the weather forecaster or the contractor or the nurse or the coach, but with poetry, the problem is, you can't just stop being a poet, i.e., retire from writing poetry. Poetry is like a spring. It flows as long as it flows. It flows through the poet. Even if the poet wants to stop writing, because of what is coming up, he / she can't. It's not possible. So you write a good poem one day and a bad poem the next day, a disturbing poem, a threadbare poem, followed (almost miraculously) by a poem that seems to have answers and a certain gravitas, but there are no vacations. There are no retreats from writing poetry for the life-long, born poet (or born-again poet, the late-bloomer). It's kind of like how I see farming here in Vermont. If you are a farmer it is just what you do, it's in your blood, for better or for worse, certainly not for riches or fame or making friends in high up places. But, if the poet is writing a poem titled "Where is the poet?" and the answer is, behind the barn throwing a knife into a board, that has to be taken seriously, at least by the poet. It must mean something. Someone might question the veracity of this statement. Does it have to mean something?
As a dreamworker of some 50 years experience, I actually know something about dreams, and one thing that I know is, they always mean something. Is the same thing true of a poem? Probably not. Wait. . . (I'm arguing with myself) . . . Let me unpack how it is true that every dream means something and then we'' see if the same logic applies to poetry.
Dreams are symbolic and they are energized by archetypes, which generate fields of psychic energy that attract content and create patterns of content. That is why dreams are like stories (or story fragments). They are stories showing us what our lives look like from inside out. When we dream, we are inside ourselves, inside our beings. The stories of our dreams feature us as a main character, but the context of the stories of our dreams is largely subjective. That is why they need to be interpreted. The dreamer provides the necessary associations that come together like fractal pieces of a meaningful puzzle around the energetic field of the archetype.
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