Sonnet august 18
I wonder where I wandered
before I came upon
this sonnet of sixteen lines
reminds me of updates
complex answer to that question
misplaced inside my head
squandered much the same as sometimes
replaced by jargon instead traced
misread limits of harmonic progression
and linear regression a muddle of memory
based upon rhymes, rhythms and the like
suggestions not quite conscious ramblings
of something I might write
New Approach
I have become a language poet delighting in the wonders of language. Words are not just signifiers. Other words might signify the same thing. What they denote differs in what they connote. It is also more than what words suggest as in metaphors or symbols. Words have a specific sound, shape, rhythm, potential rhymes and near rhymes to play with to discover what possibilities that lie [in both senses] beneath in our Creative Unconscious.
I have become less interested in surface meaning or emotion, but rather in the pleasures of sound itself. Words themselves with their potential rhymes and near rhymes become the source of new associations. I use randomness in discovering connections like John Cages’ use of the I Ching. Even the random mistakes a cellphone dictation might make becomes an interesting discovery as well as as annoyance. Randomness produces possibilities, but as the artist, I get to choose which ones to use. Also like the abstract artist or the nuclear physicist, I believe is good to look below to see the structure beneath.
Poetry give us little unless it surprises us in some way. This is why I enjoy John Ashbery’s poetry: It is not the meaning of his poems but his method of surprising and delighting us and his play upon the contemporary scene. The delight is in seeing something in a new way thereby enriching us.