Last night I nearly panicked when it appeared I had lost the entire contents of a chapbook* I’d put out a couple of years ago. So there I was, after midnight, wandering through directories on two computers and several memory sticks and digging through boxes of abandoned backup CD’s. Not a trace, it seems.

Then I sat down at the laptop to check mail and, lo!, there it was. The folder was called newpoetry, not just poetry or poems or whatever else I had been trying to find. And there was the chapbook, There’s More to Blues than Meets the Eye. Whew. And the separate Word documents for the poetry, including one from 2006 that I’d forgotten about, the very brief “What the Kitty Cat Said,” which I put up in the immediately previous post. It’s a good thing to forget a poem sometimes because you might be delighted on its rediscovery.

This led to actually reading some of the poetry I wrote a couple of years ago and finding that, by golly, I liked it. Some of it is good stuff. I’d forgotten. I don’t think I’m ready to go out on a reading tour, but I might find a way to move it into my act (whatever that turns out to be–”A Night of Pretensions With Stan!”–that oughta move the crowds! Why, I’ll be rich! Rich!).

The impetus for this hunt came from offering Ken Walker, good ol’ Herbie, the last copy of the fifty or so I’d made in 2006. It took quite a while to get rid of them, but now that they’re gone, I want another stack. I guess they’ve become part of my identity. I hand them out with something like, “Here. You’ll understand me better if you read this.” The little essay from the cover is even interesting. I insist, as I still do, that real poetry is an event, it’s out loud or not at all. The words on a page are a plan for a poem that might happen if someone reads them out loud. I’m glad to see, with rap and the new spoken word movement, that the rest of the world is coming to a similar view. I’d insisted on it back in Muncie. Here’s a poem from somewhere around 1978, when I was standing my first gig as a graduate assistant and teaching English 103. This came from a discussion I was having with a trio of students.

A Poem Is More
A poem is more
Than a trivia trick
Tricked out

A melodious voice
or rough as the breath
that breaths it

A cardinal voice
that speaks all love
and madness spoken;

A hastening voice
That reasons the song
That death will sing:

A poem is more,
Breath speaking song,
A poem is more.

So I’ve been consistent, more or less in insisting on vocalization. Good to know that one is keeping the hobgoblins in order.

 

*Chapbook: A book made on the cheap, Joe Perez pointed out to me the first time I took one to the Narcisco Martinez Cultural Arts Center Writing group, pointing out, also, that the fate of chapbooks was to rest in the corners of one’s aunts bookcases as the aunts, lovely creatures that they are by their very nature, were the only ones on whom one could pawn a chapbook even at the usual price, free.