From a letter to me by Jackson MacLow: “One rather silly criticism – not so much a criticism as a helpful hint as to how to get some of the people who aren’t on to how good your stuff is on to it: take the trouble to check SPELLINGS! this may seem very picayune to you, but you’d be surprised by how many people who might read you seriously are turned aside by such occasional misspellings as ‘madregal’.” ... pps. “From the title of your foldout bk. (Ishlar Robinhood Fuck Spelling) I gather my hint will fall on deaf ears.”
What is missed here by Jackson is that my misspellings are for the most part clenchs or puns. Why is to be creative within the word verboten just because “many people” are “turned aside”? I agree with Michael McClure’s statement “Urge (in poetry) outvalues communication” (passion before convention) & William Burroughs’ view of poetry (formally) being 100 yrs. behind painting. In Ishtar & Quark’s Heart I was also allowing a psychic spelling to come up in the works (in that words are both depth symbols: – wonder emotional magical beings–& signa-signs–relays of culture identity) all the rare words I dictionarily spelled & the neologisms & conventional misspellings were done with care (feeling) gone over, revised (in some instances many times) after the initial rhythm-thought or deliberately left obscure, random as an interesting mystery poetry yoga for the reader following S. Sontag’s dictum: “The author is not the authority of his or her creation.”
With the acceptance now of (chance encounter): A. Breton, (Various versions): Jack Spicer, (gcode jazz): Clark Coolidge, (literalism): Peter Orlovsky, (invented language): Michael McClure, (phonetic letteristics): Ezra Pound, Bernard Shaw (feeling up the noun): Gertrude Stein (Montage - juxtaposed-foldings): Ron Rosen, Jack Foley, William Burroughs & (poly-entendre): James Joyce etc. etc. etc. in prose & poetry, why my spellings should he considered ignored, taboo I don’t know. (& they aren’t, won’t be among eleusinian friendships/cogent adventurers of poetry.)
I’ve always felt-thought that, this: the whole purpose of art was & is (if art has a point or purpose, sometimes I’m in a non-reference, there’s no corresponding reality mood & its all I’m we, madeup genetics, eternal inheritance is a fiction. – Othertimes as Artaud said “knowledge & imagination must be one. “ – .words, sentences do refer to real objects, subjects inside & outside of us – undercutting Rudolf Carnap’s nostrum that “poetry is just emotional whimsy’. – or “random acrostic & diastic-selection systems’? – For poets nonsense is impossible, they are always, via any imaginative interpretation of the reader, making “statements”) to inspire & liberate the poet & everybody.
Since we all (even M. McClure with his “invented Language’) employ conventional letters at least – though there’s singing arguments for idea-pictures, cuniforms, “ray poems” breaking the atom-letter taboo once again-we writers are conveyors of tradition (neo & old classicism, (in Improvised Poetics) surmised: energy creates its own form (my words?) & ruminated ’technique is under our skin, like a porpoise’, yet he also (in I.P.) no-noed changing the sequence of lines in a poem because the continuum of natural-meditative-thought would be lost, violated.
So anarchists (i.e. believers in everybody’s “right” to any action until everybody’s down on it) can be dictators? I have to continuously – swamped, imbued by persuasions & forces (“dangerous music” D. Levertov?) ego-hubrised & pinned – giveover, make & find my own paths. Being alone & or belonging is difficult. I’m so horny I’m for my auntie. Kneeling into a skinny midget I pump like hell, wiggling between whirlpool tacklers & cokemachine mugwumps hugging each other, against the goal line. Who has the nut on taste, aesthetics for the rest of us?
“Lines zigzag the page like ants on a picnic blanket”? Maybe you’re using some other gravity-honey technique than I am to get the fitting-ant-patterns, Steve. John Montague (a wellknown longtime poet & an Oliver Goldsmith & a Yeats scholar) told me after reading O.N.P. that the poems were “good & shapely”. In some poems previously I’ve let the reader decide, according to her/his crazy breath, the length of my lines by riffing the ore of image over the whole printing surface of 11” / 16” newsprint. This time (in O.N.P.), atune with Rosenthals’ “Graphic must template the voice,” I broke the lines as I would read the silences & gave the reader an easier “in” to the ideas & how they arose (formally) on my mind-page. & if the book is seriously kenned, readers will find the text (with the exception of one typographical “dumwaitor”) phonetically & conventionally spelled.
