Feedback

It's a good question, what you mean to me. Everything, really. I don't get a lot of feedback, I mostly write in a vacuum. Emily at Amherst. I try to be transparent, she did to, I hear her strangled voice. I try to use punctuation to clarify what the words are trying to say. Late at night, when I'm awakened by something and return to writing, or start a new paragraph, I often turn on the radio. Never when I first start writing in the evening, hell, I have to kill the breaker to the fridge when I first start writing; but late at night, it's often a line from an old blues song that gets me back to my black-haired beauty (as other people have labeled my black Dell). A somber gray day. Finish rereading Maxwell Perkins' letters, split some wood, carry a few boles into the shed, take the truck to the bottom of the hill against projected rain and snow. Perkins was strange, by all accounts, not that verbal in person, but goddamn could he write letters. He dictated his letters, mostly, as did Mark Twain his autobiography (I heard that fact on the radio yesterday) and I'm amazed. I have to see the paragraph emerging in letters, bang out the rhythm with two fingers. I think of my writing as a kind of jazz. I did actually write my last book of poems, "A Summer In Hell", 14 years ago, using a small voice actuated tape recorder, and it's difficult for me to work that way, but I was living out of my truck, my options were limited. I had a portable typewriter, but in the desert of SE Utah it gummed up with wind-driven sand. I'd get a motel room once a week to transcribe what I'd taped. Mostly the sound of wind as I drove over to Colorado to get the girls for a weekend. For the first time this season, I hear a train over in Kentucky, five miles as the crow flies. A week from today I leave for Florida, eight days off-line. I'm concerned about leaving, but I have to go, not so concerned that red-neck thieves will steal my books as that they've leave the door open. You rob a place, least you can do is lock the door behind you. Janus knows his place, a door is a portal, an opening in.