Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

what is there left to the poet
I'm not talking about those darlings
of academia
those snobby goody two shoes
that think poetry is something you learn
in a text book in a class room
I'm talking about the threadbare ones
the down and outs, rejects, the misfits
the strange travelers in time
that walk down alleys of the unknown

it so happens that words are not always
what we think they are,
we are always looking for new ways
to use them

what poetry meant to me, what i mean
is that I had to find out why I needed
to be drunk, it all hit me very early on
something about the fact that nobody
taught me anything, religion did not
school did not, I could not see where
this all was headed, for a brief moment
I took a psychedelic trip, and then I
was washed up on the beach of eternity

so I needed to be drunk, I needed to write
like I was drunk on words, and I read other
poets and writers looking for that drunken boat
that Rimbaud spoke about in his famous poem
I would have to be slightly drunk
to read my poetry on the open mic
I went to after poetry reading parties
and got drunk with the other poets
I got drunk with Andrei Codrescu
when he was at the party
after reading from his first book of poems

nothing like a bunch of drunk poets
at the party, the spontaneous poetry
they spew until the end of night

weed does it for me.
it seems to relax and open the mind
to endless word equations.

problem is i lose me best poetry
cos i can't get it penned quick enough!

even a dictaphone's too slow...

...anyways, i manage to glean
something from the remnants....i think...

therefore....i like this! eph

I wrote a poetic novel about my teenage experience of the late sixties, I go into detail about the first time I got high on pot, from there I go on to describe many LSD experiences. Anyway, when I began writing poetry two years later or so, I met poets in situations where they liked to get drunk. Let me see, a lot of the poets I liked liked to drink. But I don't think Philip Lamantia was a drinker, I know Bobby Kaufman was,Kerouac, of course Bukowski was.I understand your comment about trying to write while high. In any case besides actually the reality that poets sometimes are drinkers, I was thinking that to write a poem , you have to be drunk on words, in the sense that you have to disorganize the senses, like Rimbaud said.But there are other implications implied, what is that draws a person to want to be a poet. Do you write out of your pain or pleasure, do you see with the eyes of a poet, is that like being drunk or sober.And so it goes.

Keep in mind that the world of poets that I tend to speak of is the world that as it appeared when I was a young poet, and so when I write now I am remembering that world, because for instance that is when it all happened, I began my journey as a poet and it unfolded in those times. Those times were much different, no computers, so a lot of information was not easy to find, a lot was not there. What I mean to say is that if you started writing poetry on a computer, that you will never know what it was like to live in the world without a computer.
And because of this, a lot of creative insight that was found in poetry before computers has been lost. In some way we have gained but in others we have lost. At least from my perspective. There is so much more to say about this, but it is like trying to talk about ufo's. As a metaphor poetry is like ufo's, people see them, but everybody sees something different, one second they are there the next they are not. I wrote my poem and what did you see, did you see the words, or did you see one line or two, if you read my poems do you begin to see how I see poetry. If you could read a poem I wrote in 71' could you see who I was then.

Poets drunk on words....I like this