It’s not that I want to say

It’s not that I want to say that poetry is disconnected from
having something to say; it’s just that everything I want to say
eludes me. But if I caught it I wouldn’t want it and you wouldn’t
want it either. Maybe poetry is what happens on the bus between
wanting and having. I used to think it was what happened on
the bus between oakland and berkeley. And it was, too, like
violet texas in people voices, all kinda subtle transmission broke
off by stops and bells, repercussive riding, mobile contact, slow
symposium. Now, even in the absence of my office, I still want
to move and so I have to move but never get there in this whole
extended region of not being there, of stopping and saying not
here, not here, and of that being, in the end, pretty much all
I have to say. What I want to say is that having something to
say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life
in somebody else’s sound and grammar, its placement in my
head, my placement in the collective head as it moves on down
the line. The itinerant ensemble arrangement of the 40, and
sometimes of the 15, is where I started studying how to live in
poetry. I want to transfer study as a practice of revision on the
edge, where ethics and aesthetics are in parallel play. Some kind
of homeless shift between reading and writing that emerges in a
set as our cut- up schedule, a willow’s diverse list of things, point
to point restlessness, interlocking schemes of material breaks,
the constantly renewed syllabus of a new composers guild in the
middle of enjoying itself. What we come together to try to do
starts to look like what we do when we come together to enjoy
ourselves, handing saying what we want for one another to one
another in and out of words.