"So the life is to exist and integrate
as thoroughly and fluidly as possible
into that existence, the poetic act.
It's the becoming.
All the ways of being in the world or its way
through its way, that it is the space
through which the sensations and intelligences pass.
But saying that is already too outside,
a kind of breathing metabolism, a social and private,
bodily and immersive, porous, not controlled and exhibited,
but moved through, part of, physical and made.
Gush of sun, my body's blood springs
red beads and winter's done.
Parasol of dust goes poof.
And here come the green weeds up to the brick wall again.
We so often connect haiku with the natural world.
But I end up thinking of the street photographers
of the '60s and '70s walking around
and immersed in constant responsive construction.
I think of Garry Winogrand, who said,
I photograph to see what things look like photographed,
but was only half telling the truth.
When he died, there were 2000 rolls
of undeveloped film in his apartment.
It seems maybe that he photographed
to be photographing.
So I want to show you some things,
and read you some things, and talk
about the physical experience of these poems, how
they appear and are formed, how they change and grow.
The space in time they get made and how on the page they live.
Beside each other, with each other, and me, inside,
outside me.
This notebook is where I see them first,
where I write them down.
And there and then, an ink and paper thing of them is made.
This book that's always with me.
I made this book too, paper folded and sewn
and put in my pocket and walked around with always.
So always or almost always, when a poem appears for me,
this is where it appears.
So then, there it is.
And I keep carrying it around.
Or soon, others or other things of life
appear beside it, above it, on top of it,
and around with me it goes.
And these poems, the ones I'm talking about today,
I wrote between 2008 and 2012.
I would go home.
And there, I had a pile of paper like this."
I brought things to show, a pad of paper like this.
"This is actually some of it, cut down to a bit bigger
than 5 by 7 inches.
I don't know why.
I just wanted some small space for each poem, waiting.
There, the empty pile and easy to throw into my typewriter
and type one up.
And then sit with a pile of them all together,
shuffle through and read them, and always I
would have a pen or some whiteout and sort of scratch
them down or build them up a bit,
made things, messing with them.
And as the pile grows and gets made, gets bigger.
The poems could rub down to nothing.
I had a kind of perverse relation to the whiteout,
knowing that once gone, soon forgotten, and soon forgotten
and really gone.
It was this making space a kind of relation
to the physical things, which had appeared.
I could then write ever--
I could then write over where the white was, some totally
different words or leave the space there as air or time
to be seen or heard as empty spaces heard, and rewritten,
I could keep the space and build it and let it grow.
And I could hold the little batch of poems.
I could hold 100 or 200 in a bag, easy as anything
and go off wherever I was off to.
So I found that they, in all the traveling I actually
did, would get shuffled and shook,
would get constantly read aloud when carried around.
And so one being next to the other,
here, I think it is important how fragmentary they
are, drifting in and out of each other, so hearing them.
And small, how small they are.
So hearing them one next to another.
So speaking them over and over in varied relation,
they tug and push with sound and sense
as lines might do to other lines.
A kind of tuning, a kind of tumbling.
The physical experience is simple.
I write them and then I type them up,
and then I read them and write them out, and read them again,
and write things down, and move them around, and type them up,
and years pass.
Light in sky and breath from thoughtful people
fills the air.
I'm patted down like wet green grass,
the wind has blown my hair a bit.
One so strange and big and scape of empty sky,
cut out moon black pillars resisting opaque time."