morning thoughts

My morning thoughts have, already, been all over the place -- a ruffled ostrich in a plasma tornado. But they seem to have settled down onto a certain spot.

Consciousness has not been explained, nor can it be, I think. Language is complementary to human consciousness, so maybe it also can't be explained. Cool. Okay. But mind/words allow the world to experience itself. Far out. And poetry is, perhaps, a condition of soul within which world gets down to its weirdest, saddest, most erotic, most natural, or most alarming beingness. Brodsky's thoughts have had an effect on my opinion about such things.

So, poetry. If via compressed, intense language world approaches itself from different angles, then poetry is not about a poet selecting the day's theme, or about a poet mining a particular vein to smithereens. Rather, poems are where anything can happen, just like world. Thus and therefore and hence or whatever, the poet is a medium, an attitude, an opening, a radar dish.

And as Connie Stadler recently said: "I've always felt being a poet was more about how one viewed the world than what was put to paper; the second flowing naturally from the first."