Last night was Easter. We had brunch at Barclay's where we dropped three bills. The idea was to Joseph Lease, but 3pm?! Come on! Who can make that date? I wanted to go very much, but it didn't work out.• We had our meeting. That was good. There was much to discuss. We're actually coming out with a translation publication spear-headed by Alex Snipes, who is simply incredible in many ways--languages in particular. Many of us are very excited about this ambitious new project.
• There's going to be another open mic this week at Nabolom.
• A few of us are starting a band.
• Some people read poetry.
• Others worried about the fate of their souls.
• Still others were preoccupied with the fate of their theses.
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After that, we proceeded to break as many laws and taboos as possible in one night, filling our pockets with cocktail napkins covered in unintelligible doggerel.
Shake your heads and wag your fingers at us. We are shaking our heads and holding them while we freshen our pens to start again. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.
I read today that life-styles like ours are myths. . . such a statement is ridiculous. Writers who don't drink always look at the ones who do and put their hands on their hips and cluck like chickens. Tsking tsking tsking. That is fine. I don't mind the name-calling too much. I don't mind them not understanding the lure of the night. It isn't a problem that they sit on the sidelines like armchair generals while we battle for something, some undefinable thing. We are hungry for different things.
But here's the problem: we exist. I've heard from numerous people who say things with great certainty and authority that writers like us are not successful, that writers who indulge in the darker parts of life are unable to produce, to deliver. We're right over here in the street, we're waving at you from the battlefield, you can hear us laughing on your stoop in the middle of the night. We're right over here with our latest masterpieces, our 4.0's, and our acceptance letters to the places everyone wants to go. In fact, we're always at those places everyone else wants to be, it seems impossible when you just saw us in that place where you wouldn't be caught dead. But gravity seems impossible. . . and rainbows.
The way we live is not mythological, it is the stuff of legends.
5 comments:
We can only speak for ourselves, I'm afraid. I personally like a good night out, but I rarely, if ever, use anything from those nights in my poems. Plenty of poems have been and will continue to be written about nights of drunken abandon, and I will likely continue to not read them since they rarely offer anything new beyond the "we were drunk and crazy" angle that has become all too familiar.
My basic feeling about the relationship between alcohol and poetry? Bukowski has already done it; there is nothing new to be written about alcohol. That doesn't mean that I personally dislike to drink. I just don't believe it has a strong connection to my poetry.
I don't think I was talking about writing about alcohol. I don't want to be Bukowsk, but I would gladly give a few years of my life to have written The Sun Also Rises or really almost anything else by papa.
The comment of being young and boring is ageism. Seeing as you have no idea how old I am, foolish. As for needing lubricant, the night and the life one leads there are the stuff of legends. Get off your high horse.
please see Jaime Saenz The Night. hehe.
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