Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

@richpuchalsky
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PPS: I wrote above that labor is human, but elsewhere I have written about animal labor and even plant labor. Labor is no more human than poetry is.

PS: The moment that other poets remember most from this poem is the joke:

"Clouds outside make days different
From other days, in the quality of light
Or they make Rorschach shapes
Clouds outside love the pathetic fallacy
And wander around lonely"

Look up the Pathetic Fallacy if you haven't heard of it, it's waiting for you to.

And I will never have the time to do that. As I wrote in yesterday's poem: "America, you get the fucking poets you deserve."

Everyone's voice is valuable is another way of saying that no one's voice is valuable, that there might as well not be human voices at all but just the voice of the Earth. The rest is labor, a very different and human thing.

/fin

The end is the crystalized thought that the poem is struggling towards, but doesn't quite reach because it's not quite finished. I've tried variations like "Your voice isn't needed" or "No one's voice is needed" but -- it needs more editing than I can give it.

Did you ever see the draft version of Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay"? It was like three times longer than the masterpiece of concision that it became.

Poetry is not human:

"The easiest way to resolve is go backwards
Before there were words or understanding
Before cats evolved, before there were clouds
Before the Earth formed an atmosphere
Before an inside or an outside, there was poetry

Poetry is inhuman
Everywhere the Earth from the beginning
No voices are needed "

But most of all it's a radical poem -- radical not in the meaning of radical politics, but radical as getting back to the root. There is a recurring question about each subject: is it human? We made domestic cats from wild cats that settled with us, so they are human. We project ourselves into clouds, so they are human. Is poetry human?
And it's about the love of the general poetry body of work, even the lowest common denominator one that rolls around the US in English. The poem names Bukowski, Stevie Smith, and Robert Frost, and strongly implies reference to Wordsworth, Carl Sandburg, and T.S. Eliot.

So: cats, clouds, poetry itself. Each presented as itself inside, and as itself outside.

So the poem is also about my love of classification and organization which stands me in good stead as a librarian, but not a poet. You may have noticed that my posts contain more numbered points than any human should really produce.

At one level this poem is about the subjects of poems. Anyone who either is teaching or in a poetry writing group (i.e. almost every US poet) has heard many beginning poets write. This is not really about their subjects, which tend to be My Exotic Vacation, My Romance, My War Story, My Heritage from My Grandmother, or My Joke. It's about the favorite subjects of the poems that people vaguely remember reading.

#ClassicPoetry #NationalPoetryFoolMonth
#poetry

Today's poem is for a change not about recent politics. It was written maybe 2016? And it's about poetry, one of the favorite subjects of poets:

https://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2016/05/some-notes-towards-four-most.html

some notes towards: four most overwritten subjects / inside and outside

some notes towards: four most overwritten subjects / inside and outside Cats outside run through grass Leaping, amazed at new freedom M...