i keep all my poems in a variety of word files obsessively stored in a number of places and constantly updated and recopied to new media. palm pilot, CDs, zipdrives, web storage, hard copies, you name it.

i have been extraordinarly lax, however, in moving the LJ poems (most of which are written in the posting field and then edited publicly over time before final edits offline in word) from here to the storage media.

i just did that for the first time since late april.

i pulled off 72 poems. and i didn’t even pull them all off…

scary number of poems to have written and not saved. i had a lot on paper, of course, but mostly when i would drop the text into wordpad prior to a reading so i could have a copy.

nothing permanent beyond here.

jeez.

i’m still sick and in midst of school work, so i’ll be briefer than i should be — plenty to fill in, but want to capture this early before i forget.

1. i don’t think of a lot of the work you are doing in these poems as surrealist.

2. i think a lot of poems labeled as surrealist are not truly surrealist.

3. what i believe is that our own poetic traditions limit our willingness to look deeper for connections between/among the images we use in our work.

4. i think a lot of supposed surrealist metaphors make illogical sense if you assume that the brain knows what it’s doing. in other words, raw chicken does relate to NASCAR to immortality to walnut furniture. something connected those things for me, therefore there’s a connection. see?

5. now: in relationship to the reader of our work, we have to walk the fine line between staying so obscurely personal in our connections that no one can understand the work, to being so accessible that we just hop or step between our metaphors and provide no chance for the reader’s own sense of metaphor to get a workout.

6. this last is part of the reason i’ve grown so irritated with slam over the years, but i digress.

7. i let the metaphors and images and associations i receive in my meditations dictate the poem’s structure and process — NOT the other way around.

8. I work in service to the metaphors.

9. I work to make the connections apparent without creating billboards.

10. I work to let the associative processes of my mind/soul/unconscious display themselves in such a a way that they trigger the same process in my readers/listeners; they may not go to where i intended, but the journey should be similar.

I have no idea how coherent that is. I have no idea how it helps.

I just think you should read more of the alleged Spanish “surrealists” and see if what i’m saying makes sense.

Dive in folks — and remember, i have a fever.

happy birthday to Final Girl herself, final_girl, Ms. Daphne G!!!!!

I hear she loves trash. Call her up and sing it to her.

T