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JH: Yes, I find psychological territory very interesting - home of a creator that sometimes creates, and sometimes writes alongside, the poet (or indeed, anyone). I consistently think of myself as a poet, no doubt because it is an honorific! Speaking of poets, I really admire your latest poem "chump change directory":


dear logical popcorn,

what's up with turning the tooth over the free bast mundane? did you clear the evergreen from the highway? and what's up with stone bob, when you are fraught with ocean? what's up with saying, hey, camera, the breaks of owning? what's up with tidal glop on my seasonal diorama? puh-lease! what's up with sped when you could've loped? what's the matter with Cambridge that what's up seems like a carousal? what's up when the dental freeing stoops over lambasted tendencies? whose fortresses exactly seem glum when the document includes 'what's up'? go for detergent while you still have time, my dearest logical popcorn. I'm caught in framework.


Could you say a few words about this poem? It strikes me as being anaphoric strictly y coincidence, like a cloud looking like a camel. The words "logical popcorn" made me think of "logical positivism". The concluding line is great - the answer to "what's up" lying outside the framework the narrator occupies, with the penultimate line suggesting that logical popcorn is possibly able to get the answers while going going outside the framework?) for detergent.

AHB: the poem is an epistle, a form I use periodically. I find such an address easy, so I try not to use it too often. I like the curious direction of such a poem. I can't recall the poem's initial impetus, but the what's up line rang in my head. these poems are always written quickly, with the perspective of discovery. the idea that something exists outside the framework of the narrator, and the reader perhaps, seems to be a condition of these poems. But enough about me. Perhaps yoiu recognize this poem (exhibit A). It was posited ot Wryting-L on the evening of October 31 (EST), Halloween.

Hears Wasted on the Hears You Smoothened

long phantoms on short nights, thine prayers have mine as full heirs your destined woe shaken-out unveiled portions your destiner must've ordered http://www.ncf.ca/~ek867/annaakhmatova.jpg
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: the break of day severs limbs and portions that were caught inside the daylight minute when spectres vanish at break of day these limbs and portions become people (you & me) alive in the daylight there have been no true births in many years I, the author of this portion (words), am working on naming the portion of time when no true births first started happening (circa U.S. Civil War, 1861 - 65)

* * * * *

the last 3 lines are thunderous to me. I'm currently involved in a study of the active imagination, and the idea of an era when no true births started happening makes me think of the modernist era. By modernism I mean from the effing Industrial Revolution (Blake's World) to the present day. I'm rereading HD's Tribute to Freud, which reveals her energy in rediscovering a more elemental world. Your poem seems of that nature. You often cite artists and their work in your work. To be honest, I have never read Sainte-Beuve, don't even have much of an impression of him. How does he effect the poem? And the image you include, I don't know that work from nuthin', either. Which is not to say I can't get something from the poem. How do these tributaries serve the poem, if tributaries they be? Was the poem built on something Sainte-Beuve wrote or on the visual image?

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JH: So the poem is uncertain to such a pitch that the uncertainty of words seems a paradise of certainty? The myriad interpretations and even definitions a word has to offer may indeed seem refreshingly limited to a poem waiting to be written (or read). The poet as pillar of calm, compared to the poem? Is comparison of poet and unwritten poem the act that creates a written poem? Who does the comparing, poet or unwritten poem? Perhaps the comparing is done afterwards by the written poem or the reader?


AHB: The poet as pillar of calm, there's something to that. Not that I for one feel much calm. Perhaps in this instance, my feelings don't matter. Or at least, the nervous proposition of who I am is only a part of the writer. Or the writer is the calm part of who I am. In the act of writing, of any art, tho one may struggle with technical matters, one is calm in the act. A connection to the flow. Even as a messy, confused young writer, I felt calm in the writing act. This image you make, the comparison (or relationship?) of poet and unwritten poem, maybe that does create the written poem. I carry an image of the poet, and I don't mean in the careerminded way, but of this maker with whom I relate. And I sense a written poem out there, the one poem. These considerations are not actively or consciously present very often for me, but I am aware of them periodically. I usually content myself with saying I'm a writer, which is easily prioven by the mass of writing I'm made. Rarely do I think of myself as poet, for that seems more, well, I was going to say arbitrary, but I also mean honourific, and I also mean elemental. Elemental in the sense that a writer could be writing ad copy, but a poet aims (even crappy poets) towards something more basic. Well, la-dee-dah. We'we smoking out psychological territory, aren't we?