Perforation Problems

Someone posted this on soulpancake.com in response to the question, "Is Poetry Dead?" Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split and I with no way to make her come back and everywhere the world is bare bright bone white crystal sand glistens dope death dead dying and jiving drove her away made her take her laughter and her smiles and her softness and her midnight sighs— Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and democracy and communism fuck smack and pot and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck the whole muthafucking thing all i want now is my woman back so my soul can sing “Feeling Fucked Up” from The Essential Etheridge K...

Tonight in class one of my fellow grad students said this: "Writers feel a lot of shame in the egomania that's involved in writing...it makes them focus on their failures." I found that interesting, and it spoke to a lot of what I feel when I'm writing, and probably part of the reason every blog I've ever started gets abandoned. It also reminded me of something I tweeted three days before: "Artists of all kinds find themselves in a dilemma characterized by the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found." (From "When We're Alone in Public: The Metabolic Work of Eileen Miles," Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson.) Agreed. I constantly feel a need to hide - even making my Twitter public has been an agonizing dilemma for me. It's much safer to keep one's thoughts within - there's no criticism, no opportunity to be misunderstood or disliked - or perhaps...