explaining much, explaining nothing...

If I were to attempt a description of my own writing – I would have to use the word landscape. There are birds, rivers, mountains, the sea... But I must add that it’s a landscape that’s not limited to nature. The landscape is often contrived or already existent. The setting is usually one that is viewed rather than one that is traversed. And it’s usually empty. What that says about me as a writer, I’m sure, must explain much – though not to me. I don’t try to get at that. If you move too close to something, the perspective disappears. Maybe it’s too fragile.

One of my earliest and most vivid memories – I must have been three, maybe four – is my looking through, carrying around, or always having close by… my father’s college text Art History of the Western World when he was a student at Florida Southern. I became lost in those paintings, the photographs, the sculptures. What was most fascinating was not that the pieces of art put me in another place – it was that places inside me opened. And that was phenomenal for me at that time in my life.

Way leads on to way, as Frost writes, and I found myself approaching film, for example, in the same way. I wouldn’t really – and still don’t – watch a film. I study a film. I’ve never been able to approach any of the arts from the point of entertainment. I don’t write to entertain; I don’t read to be entertained. I don’t want a good read. I don’t want just to listen to good music. I do want the world(s) of music all around me. If I’m in the right place, something gets at me, and that makes me who I am.

It makes since, then, that my own work unfolds in a few phases or gatherings: film, art, music, literature. That may be a weakness – I can’t say – but I can’t seem to break free of that, and I’m not certain that I want to. My world – maybe even my life – is a reaction to, an understanding of, a going into the arts. Always has been. Instead of creating a new world for a protagonist, I place characters inside an already created world. A view from inside a film. A piece of music. Reaction to painting. And so on. Many of the people in my works are dead. But, reality is such a difficult notion to approach. The reality in my head may be the blues singer’s death in 1938. Or at least my take on that death.

I do remember that Stanley Kunitz said that poets don’t really (or shouldn’t would be more clear) choose the subjects of their poems. The poem chooses the pen, chooses the writer. I rest in that. Call it surrender, call it giving in, call it going into. So be it. Here I go.