In the earlier post I mentioned a headache.

Please change “headache” to “migraine.”

My eyes hurt. Going to hide in the dark. Bye.

CNN will be streaming their real-time archive of the coverage of 9/11 on their site on Monday, starting at 8:30 AM. So if you want, you can relive the whole thing just the way it happened.

I won’t be watching, but I can understand why someone might want to see it.

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In other news, I have a headache.

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Just finished reading the Bob Dylan interview in Rolling Stone. I hadn’t picked up RS in a long time, so it was interesting to see the rag. It seems to have improved from the last time I read it.

I tend to agree with Dylan’s approach toward his music, where he says that he doesn’t listen to his albums and thinks of them as documentation more than as discrete works of art. I kinda feel that way about my books — I get focused on the next thing almost as soon as I’ve finished one.

An example: the set I’m planning for the shows on 9/24 and 10/9 (the Jim Poems, accompanied by Faro on bass) is really exciting and I think it’s going to kill (especially the ending), but in reading through the poems I’m already seeing a next set that continues Jim’s story, and I’m starting to get impatient to get these performances out of the way so I can “move on.”

This stands in direct contradiction to my own frustration with poets who don’t get up to read “unless I’ve got something new.” While I read new stuff all the time as part of the editing process, I think it’s critical NOT to abandon older work in favor of the fresh. Poems continue to resonate and change after they are “done.” We bring new things and experiences to them, and the reading of them changes (or at least, it should).

We have such a narcissistic streak — we think the latest and greatest stuff we just came up with needs to be heard immediately. Robert Bly once said that the urge to be excited all the time, to experience novelty, is a form of narcissism, and I agree with him. Life isn’t always new and exciting, and neither are we.

As I said, though, I’m as guilty as everyone else. I fight the tendency all the time. I try to balance the amount of new and old I do in open mikes and features. After all, the old poems are likely new to SOMEONE in the audience, and if you wrote them well enough, they should stand up.