After Independence Day

Aside from a pleasant lunch with her family, myainsel and I blissfully ignored the holiday. Not that we were feeling particularly antisocial or unpatriotic (well, no more than usual, I'm sure) but she's been away for a couple weeks, and frnakly, we justed wanted to chill and spend time together at home. I love fireworks, but I don't lament missing them this year. (Although if we were in California, I suspect we'd have gladly headed to meanjoevoodoo's place, as I miss his Fourth of July soirees, particularly how the streets of San Clemente begin to resemble a sort of benign war zone, they're so covered with explosions and smoke. Plus, I just plain miss meanjoevoodoo.)

Among other completely mundane activities, we watched the "Anthony Bourdain: Decoding Ferran Adria" special. I have to admit, it's rare that a food/travel show has so deeply rocked my thoughts about the artistic process. Adria uses experimental methods to completely recontextualize food. I can't do it justice, but it looks like it'll re-air on the Travel Channel. At one point, Bourdain confesses to how much Adria's work threatens him, how he's forced to admit that he thought he knew the boundaries of cooking, and that he was wrong. At one point, Bourdain poses the rhetorical question, "Is it Good?" and concedes that just scratches the surface.

This is everything I've wanted to do as a writer, and what I yearn for as a reader. It's been a long time since a poem or poet has shattered my conception of literature's boundaries -- really, not in any significant way since I first met pswordwoman back in '94.

Now, for all her brilliance, pswordwoman uses a lot of diction and devices that, in lesser hands, never scrape deeper than the mundane. I was already treading in the waters of postmodernism at that point -- taking my sturdy old T.S. Eliot love and being inspired by newer writers like Jeff McDaniel, Ellyn Maybe and Matthew Niblock. pswordwoman proved to me that -- while my named influences here might have been able to dig deep into emotional wells using postmodern tricks, I wasn't going anywhere near as deep as I could go. She was walking fearlessly into places I didn't dare venture, and was doing it with simpler language and more elegant lines.

It's not the bad writers out of slam (or any movement, really) that so irk the ivory tower crowd, it's the ones that do a trick they can't replicate. It infuriates and threatens them. Personally, I don't think they're threatened enough. Watching the discussions with Adria last night, I realized how much I long to be terrorized by writing again, to be forced into a place I hadn't even considered existed. And I long to uncover that terror myself, to shake off the confines of what I think are my own boundaries -- the ones others have told me exist and the ones I've told myself exist, and stare once more into that terrible, frightening beauty.

Column Posted!

My newest column is up at GotPoetry.com:

Wild Sex in the Working-Writer Class: Don’t worry, it happens to everyone.

As always, thanks to johnpowers for the valiant work he puts in over at GotPoetry, and for his belief in and support of the "How To Succeed as A Failing Writer" column. John's one of those people who are so terribly, terribly important to the health and well-being of poetry both here in New England and nationally, and he can't be appreciated enough for the work he does.

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