Hey, You . . . (1.15.22)

Is poetry just another way of talking to yourself?  Is prayer?

No matter what my mother tried to tell me about prayer, somehow, I always knew it's how we speak seriously to ourselves.  And no matter how semi-conscious I am of an external audience "receiving" or listening in on a poem as I write it, I shall always feel that the act of writing, too, is auto-chat.

Elio shared a lovely poem with us last week in which he addresses himself directly, even going so far as to call himself by name.  If that doesn't make you feel the least bit self-conscious, you are a rock.

So, I thought upon hearing Elio's poem that it'd be a good project for us all . . . to speak directly to ourselves in verse.  I've written of myself in the past, meaning, poems about me in the third person: 

That Clark, he's a curious boy,

 A little bit rash, a little roy.

(Don't ask me, it's just a rhyme . . .)

But this isn't what Elio did, and it's not what I am proposing for this week's project.  For this week, speak directly to yourself.  You can do it any way you like, but I can see as I write this what dull conversations we may have together, us and we.  In fact, they may not be conversations at all, but one-way prescriptions for living better lives.  You'll be tempted, I have no doubt of it, to give yourself advice.  You'll find it hard to resist delivering a little lecture . . .

Now, Clark, don't you think

you've wasted enough of your pasture

on development projects, on 

building The Tower, like Mr. Jeffers?

Stop with the lugging of stone

and pounding of shapes into place,

old man, leave off the hod & mortar

and the eye on the sun you'll

someday mount like a prince of Babel.

Husbandry, my fellow fellow!

Let the land lie and the mown grass

revise to wild seed, to a late afternoon's

dreamscape of eh, whatever . . .

Honestly, I tried to steer this little self-address away from the giving of good advice.  It's not easy to do.  It's easy not to do!  And as we all must know by this time in our lives, all advice is bad anyway, except for good advice, which is often fatal.

Well, give it a try for next Wednesday and see what you can come up with.  Maybe you won't have a conversation; maybe you'll speak to yourself and get no response in return (that happens to me more often than I'd like to admit).  Maybe you'll just have a silly chat with yourself about the snow we're about to get, or so they say, tomorrow, or, depending on when you get started on the project, the snow we dodged or survived the other day, tomorrow.