{"id":15356,"date":"2014-03-21T13:09:56","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T17:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=15356"},"modified":"2014-03-21T13:09:56","modified_gmt":"2014-03-21T17:09:56","slug":"i-used-to-think-but-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/i-used-to-think-but-now\/","title":{"rendered":"I Used to Think… But Now…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"'On<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “On second thoughts…,” by Tim Norris on Flickr<\/a>. (Click to enlarge.) Used under a Creative Commons license.]<\/em><\/p>\n

From\u00a0whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it’s mystifying and scarcely believed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Diane Ackerman [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another’s ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear’s labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve’s realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world’s image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see — thoughtfully.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Dan Beachy-Quick [source unknown<\/em>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Wislawa Szymborska [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from\u00a0whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

You may think it strange, Sam, that I’m writing
\na letter in these circumstances. I thought
\nit strange too—the first time. But there’s
\na misconception I was laboring under, and you
\nare too, viz. that the imagination in your
\nvicinity is free and powerful. After all,
\nyou say, you’ve been creating yourself all
\nalong imaginatively. You imagine yourself
\nplaying golf or hiking in the Olympics or
\nwriting a poem and then it becomes true.
\nBut you still have to do it, you have to exert
\nyourself, will, courage, whatever you’ve got, you’re
\nmired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter
\nand it’s written. Takes about two-fifths of a
\nsecond, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man.
\nI can deluge Congress with letters telling
\nevery one of those mendacious sons of bitches
\nexactly what he or she is, in maybe about
\nhalf an hour. In spite of your Buddhist
\nproclivities, when you imagine bliss
\nyou still must struggle to get there. By the way
\nthe Buddha has his place across town on
\nElysian Drive. We call him Bud. He’s lost weight
\nand got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a
\nlot better than he used to. He always carries
\na jumping jack<\/span> with him everywhere just
\nfor contemplation, but he doesn’t make it
\njump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney
\nand Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are
\nover by Sylvester’s Grot making the sweetest,
\ncheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air,
\nso called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering
\neverywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree.
\nSam, the remarkable truth is I can do any
\nfucking thing I want. Speaking of which
\nthere’s this dazzling young Naomi who
\nwiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee
\nlast winter, and I think this is the moment
\nfor me to go and pay her my respects.
\nDon’t go way. I’ll be right back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Hayden Carruth [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

O my pa-pa<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
\nThey sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
\nand wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,
\nwhole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
\nor those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
\nor those with middles which, if you think
\nof the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
\nof beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
\nin the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed
\nthat our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
\nand giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
\nfrom the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
\nis the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
\n“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given Your Mother’s Taste
\nfor Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”
\nThey’re not trying to make the poems better
\nso much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
\nor electrocution, as a group
\nthey overcome their individual senilities,
\ntheir complete distaste for language, how cloying
\nit is, how like tears it can be, and remember
\nevery mention of their long hours at the office
\nor how tired they were when they came home,
\nwhen they were dragged through the door
\nby their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard
\nto write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
\nnot like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
\nof wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
\nwith seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
\nwas his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
\nthe PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
\nthat they’re the most intricate version of standing up,
\nwho built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
\nthat time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
\nA bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,
\nand I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling
\non absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
\nas soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
\nthe rocket cars, as if running away from them
\nto kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
\nwasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did
\nstart to say something, to form the words hey
\nor stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,
\ninto the burning leave, and were gone
\nbefore it came to them that it was all right
\nto shout, that they should have knocked us down
\nwith a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
\nby the distance men need in their love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Bob Hicock [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Why You Travel<\/strong><\/p>\n

You don’t want the children to know how afraid
\nyou are. You want to be sure their hold on life<\/p>\n

is steady, sturdy. Were mothers and fathers
\nalways this anxious, holding the ringing<\/p>\n

receiver close to the ear: Why don’t they answer<\/em>
\nwhere could they be?<\/em> There’s a conspiracy<\/p>\n

to protect the young, so they’ll be fearless,
\nit’s why you travel — it’s a way of trying<\/p>\n

to let go, of lying. You don’t sit
\nin a stiff chair and worry, you keep moving.<\/p>\n

Postcards from the Alamo, the Alhambra.
\nPhotos of you in Barcelona, Gaudi’s park<\/p>\n

swirling behind you. There you are in the Garden
\nof the Master of the Fishing Nets, one red<\/p>\n

tree against a white wall, koi swarming
\nover each other in the thick demoralized pond.<\/p>\n

You, fainting at the Buddhist caves.
\nClimbing with thousands on the Great Wall,<\/p>\n

wearing a straw cap, a backpack, a year
\nbefore the students at Tiananmen Square.<\/p>\n

Having the time of your life, blistered and smiling.
\nThe acid of your fear could eat the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Gail Mazur [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “On second thoughts…,” by Tim Norris on Flickr. (Click to enlarge.) Used under a Creative Commons license.] From\u00a0whiskey river: Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it’s mystifying and scarcely believed. (Diane Ackerman [source]) …and: Words are substance strange. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,5,36,251],"tags":[921,1438,2828,3727,3762,3763],"class_list":{"0":"post-15356","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-06_writing","9":"category-reading","10":"category-poetry-writing_cat","11":"tag-wislawa-szymborska","12":"tag-diane-ackerman","13":"tag-hayden-carruth","14":"tag-dan-beachy-quick","15":"tag-bob-hicock","16":"tag-gail-mazur","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-3ZG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15356"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15366,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15356\/revisions\/15366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}