Poetry

I've been reading Charles Bukowski's You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense again. I read about a third of it in one reading, another third in another, and am finishing up this morning while I wait for men to come and put little flags into my front lawn.

I've read a lot of poetry, and there are lots of poets I love: Bukowski, of course...but also Arthur Rimbaud, William Shake-speare, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Kahlil Gibran, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Robert Burns, some T. S. Eliot, Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer, Pablo Neruda, John Donne, Homer, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones. The usual suspects, I guess. And, sad to say, all men and all but one white men. But you can't choose who speaks to you, even if you try.  

And there is one not famous white guy I've loved for a very long time, Jonathan Harrington. I saw his chapbook Handcuffed to the Jukebox on the shelf at the now defunct Hawley-Cooke Booksellers, and I have read and re-read the dozen or so poems in it over the decades. Even used one or two in the classroom with some success. Tried to contact Mr. Harrington once, but wasn't able to elicit a response. And I am prone to take no response as meaning no, not wanting to disturb others. That may be the secret to my lack of success in a nutshell. 

Speaking of...when I wrote that last line I wondered if Mr. Harrington had died, so I went to see what I could find. Along the way I found a reference to 

John Harington (writer) (1560–1612), English writer, inventor of the flushing toilet

and I was impressed. I mean...who knew that the flush toilet was 400 years old? I have living friends who grew up in houses that didn't have flush toilets. Literally. And I mean that literally.
I'm also wondering if that's why we sometimes refer to the toilet as The John. (There are those on the internet who say YES, by the way.)

Anyway...I didn't find anything out about my Jonathan Harrington, I'm sorry to say. 

But The Subject Was 🌹Poetry🌹.

I have demmed few books of poetry in my house, which is full of books. I don't even own any Bukowski, and I love him dearly.

I've written poetry for...I don't know, let's see...about fifty years now. Yes, pretty much spot on fifty years. I still have a collection I made of poems written for a 7th grade English class, which I bound up in home-made fashion and presented to my mother. When she died, it came back to me. And I don't know how many poems I've written, but I would guess that thousands is not an over-estimation. A couple were published. I mean that literally literally, too. And I'm not counting the high school and college literary magazines, of course, because that would just be sadder than only having two published poems.

I haven't been writing much poetry lately, though. But reading that Bukowski book, I started to feel the tapeworm uncurl within my bowels. And then I read in two successive poems references to his knocking out eleven or twelve poems in one night. And I thought, I wonder if I could do that? I was pretty sure that I couldn't. But then I thought about the songwriting project I did some time ago, wherein I challenged myself to write 60 one minute long songs. And I did that it about a month or so. And I wondered, Could I write a poem a day for a year?

I doubt it. But it's the kind of thing that I really want to try. 

So I'm going to. But not here. You don't shit where you eat, after all. I've set up A Poem A Day For A Year (at perdiempoetry.blogspot.com ...because, believe it or not, every variation of apoemadayforayear that I tried for the address was unavailable. How is that possible?).

Call me up if you've got a dime.