Thursday, September 13, 2012

Clipped Wings - Reprise

Time by ~imperioli

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." - Martin Luther King Jr

"Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car." - Evan Davis, Presenter for the BBC

"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult." - Rita Rudner, Comedienne

"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Professor Irwin Corey, American comedian, satirist and pantomimist

I think there is no doubt that I am creatively maladjusted. However, I do not feel the fate of humanity is in my hands. I do feel a destiny. I hope that I am aligned with that destiny in some way. I hope that my poetry and the other things I write and gather are part of that destiny instead of a side note or worse, a diversion.

I have no idea if either my work or my hope is important. I have saved my work in totally redundant ways, not only here on Blogger but on several remote hard drives, both of my computers and well over a thousand of my poems in two hard copy folders, hundreds of paper pages in each folder. Save my work for what? Why?

My poems are like musical performances - here in the moment and then gone. As musicians well know, the music is changed by recording it. So are my poems actual performances in the creating and when I return to them in just hours they are not what I wrote in my heart but belong to some other creature of the past, not me.

So in contrast to all that saving of the work, I have carefully stated many times that I am not attempting to hold copyright to open blog work that anyone can grab. I have a global readership. The top ten of my posts have all been accessed over a thousand times, and the top two posts over five thousand times. I am sure that relying on a global readership's goodwill is pretentious if not just plain stupid. I think there is no doubt I am creatively maladjusted.

Clipped Wings

To think of you with
wings is to lift my own heart
into the slipstream
of your feather light
flight beyond the slow moving
silver moon, twilight
colored sky, sunset
calling out your name and mine,
but I have clipped wings.

August 31, 2009 3:53 PM
This work first posted November 20, 2010
I have modified the creatively maladjusted paragraphs for this posting.

3 comments:

  1. Just now had to reject the same robot two more times on the same post. This brings the count to eight comments in eighteen hours. *sigh* Here comes word verification back soon, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  2. legacy? i listened to a great program on Phillip Glass and the interviewer, jian ghomeshi, on cbc radio, asked him about legacy. it can be heard here: http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2012/06/08/philip-glass-tells-a-different-kind-of-story/

    they begin to talk about legacy at minute 19! although the whole interview is interesting, truly!

    legacy. i think a part of accepting (truly accepting) our mortality is to completely let go of the idea of legacy. we write ourselves into existence with the knowledge that we write for our moment. it is a verb. it does not become a noun. i'm not sure anything does. i think perhaps we like to deceive ourselves with the trickery of permanency of nouns.

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Erin, the issue is needing acknowledgement and also a way to make a living, but mainly acknowledgement. If you are not motivated that way then you don't really relate to the vast majority of writers and those especially who hang nearby wishing they were writers. Most people participating in the blogging life seem to want contact with other bloggers far more than they want to create. Still, they hold their work very close if they can. It's a problem. To gain connection they have to share but then they may lose possession.

    ReplyDelete

The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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