the rules

My sweet wormed rosie.

You asked me why the weblog. Weren’t the other things enough? No, they were nothing. What about looking it all up? Sure, but what about that old new negative knowledge and that new old experience? Are you still there?

And what about that old discursive archive (like everyplace, every whom, like everything has, like Palestine has, like Albania, like me not me but the other one).

There are the old structural parallels with things happening and not happening. Remember that? See that? There is all there is to know made new. Made a new bordered thing.

Newer and more there as a charge. A jungle. Through the passive as much as anything. Or not. But as much as one thing roaming. Sure! Roaming!

Through the invisible. New and awkward, rough no place to hide or to integrate. Annoyances. Reflections. Bloody stuff to alienate or to bore. Preserving, bang, that old free critical engagement with the other, outside and inside. Screw the unspoken rules (and even the spoken ones). Screw redemption.

Did you notice?

That I didn’t mention Pound, Foucault, Said, Barthe, Brecht, Adorno? I never heard of them. Or the rules of comma use or of The Burning Babe or Durham (the last dateable poem of the old rules and the first of the new). Everyone can care about this with work or if the field opens. To one reader. I didn’t do right but I do own a splatter gun and I did see the future. That I didn’t seek shit (including morality; got it already).


Sins

What killed Jack London? What killed Jack Spicer? Why are they buried together? They got it.

I don’t blame you for having a very good modernist standard aesthetic and experience as a reader. You are good at it.

But try some sins like this.

There is energy in the passive voice.

Characters can be both smart and stupid. Tall and short.

Style can change with landscape. Or mood.

The plotline can disappear. The structure can change, even the story.

The cliché can indicate a truth.

Boring can train a reader to contrasting stuff.

The spiritual and committed need not be explicit. They need not even be there.

Or event either.

The opposite is also true.

Hope was real, but no reader yet has said she is. They don’t want her to be as she is not standard. Lots of readers love Jules and the descriptions. Jules is Joseph Kono. I heard him speak. He was taught by non-modernists. The descriptions are real-time. I walked them out. But Hope is real! I have the novel she wrote on thin blue paper. Hank (not me) actually wrote that report. Standard writing is meant to detach from the world. The for-me issue is to open a rough field to it. It helps that I am out to lose money and also not writing an ego. Quite the contrary.
By the way. I have just finished a chapbook. It is a manual for writing meant for a creative writing course. It is the style manual for my publishing house.

I would love for you to read it and comment. Perhaps some of your circle might like to too. I would appreciate it. It is short. Can I send it to you?
And keep reading.

The Rules

Why is it that T.S Eliot is considered to be an English writer while Ezra Pound is not (even though he was considered to be a traitor)? They were both precise American Types if nothing else. They even wrote each other’s stuff.

Why are Canadians who wrote only for other world markets listed in English literary lists as ‘others’ (and ignored in Canlit lists) but only when they are not bestsellers?

Why are those Canadians who write primarily about Africa, or somewhere else like Paris, but did one exquisite sentimental pot-boiler about a tiny town in the prairies (only the prairies) considered Ultra Canadian? But Malcolm Lowry isn’t (have you been to the islands in Georgia Strait)?

Hitler everyone knows was an Austrian painter.

Why are Canadian poet and journalist memoirists, grumpy arrogant ones, who write about Greek gods and also about their winning encounters with petrol station attendants, considered anything?
Why do the French not have these problems? Or Ugandans? Or Sufis?
Why is it that Canadian unemployed or Canadian poets get no government support outside of Canada, but Canadian construction companies do? Or any other business, for that matter. Even a hockey team.

Why are Canadians applying for anything, anything at all, from an address abroad considered to be invisible or cautioned on fraud?
Why is it that there is no acceptable reason to leave British Columbia? Why is it vile not to return to love in your own community emerging as its literary champion? There is no acceptable reason at all for this. Not fear of death, not imprisonment, not nausea, not any good reason at all ever. Why is it the same for Australia but not for Illinois? It is in fact the reverse for Illinois.

Why am I a Canadian in London but not one in London?