I’m not writing creatively right now for a few reasons. I still feel absolutely saturated from the program, and frankly, being back in Philly fills me with a sense of apathy towards my own work, all I can do is visualize. I want so badly to write a poem or something, but I just… don’t care right now.
I have a few ideas. Allow me to list.
-Danny Haze and I discussed a graphic novel. I haven’t told her yet, but Kath will be doing color, Danny will be inking it, I’ll be writing the story. I may enlist someone to help with layout. If you are familiar with comic book layout and design, get at me, sucka. I am interested in making this book either about Philadelphia, or making the Slaughter novella into an expanded graphic novel.
-Compiling all the notes, research, poetry and exposition about Gary Heidnik and write a book called “The Bodhisatva of North Philadelphia.” The book reconciles my attraction to serial killers and my glorification of Gary Heidnik, killer from my home town, with who he actually was as a person, based on interviews, court transcripts, police and hospital reports. I’ve developed this character who is a reflection of my own fears of who I don’t want to become as a symptom of Philadelphia, but the character I’ve created is a zeitgeist caricature of a real man who abducted, killed, and ate women. I am not this serial killer, nor do we actually have much in common, but I’ve somehow channeled him at points, and have gained a sick empathy for him. I’d like to figure this phenomena out.
-Compiling my Asemic poetry and publishing a chapbook. You know the ones: part of the “Permuted Love Poem” published two weeks ago on this site was written in my asemic style. For those of you who’ve seen them, “Ode to Blackheart” and “(Mis)carried Away” are both written in my asemic form. I don’t think I have very many of these, but hey, it isn’t so hard. They take about four times as long to write, as it’s basically all stylistically created based on personal aesthetics. I’ll be working a lot on moving away from meaning in language, and more towards deconstruction. Words are metaphors for reality, and once you realize that the metaphors themselves don’t even exist, your whole world may start to crumble.
-Compiling all poetry with structure and form based in numerics or math (mostly villanelle, terza rima, and tercet), publishing a chapbook called “Law of Threes.” I’ve been thinking of something like this for about three years (since my third semester in college), but instead of three sets of three poems making nine, I might end up doing 27 poems, separated into three parts, each subdivided into three parts. I need a thematic basis to justify these stylized pretensions.
-FINISHING THAT MOTHERFUCKING EXEGETICAL NARRATIVE (compiling into a complete book: “The Room”, “The Synesthesiac”, “Bastard Suction Experiment”, as well as endless notes written during drug-induced psychosis. Whee!)
-My fucking application to Naropa.
You bastards, all of you. Do you know I have almost 7000 hits on my page? That means I get about 500 hits a month. Is it your inexplicable attraction to me, my words, or do you just like the abuse?
A lot of people have commented on the grotesque nature of most of my poetry, and the darkness. Here is how I respond to that, after years of these critiques:
I am an artist. I create representations of emotions and feelings by synthesizing situations which cause you to empathize or emulate said feelings. Organizing symbols. This is what all artists do. They create visceral connections between you and the artist, the world, your community, yourself. They cause you to think, cause you to feel. Everyone loves happy pop art these days. Everyone loves bright, shiny, happy. Everyone loves sex and consumption.
Well, I love digging around in open wounds, and then rubbing dirt and grime and lemon juice in them. I like to cause you to see that your body is made up of these wounds, and life tends to get inside those wounds, no matter what sort of glass house you live in. Everyone can see you suffering, you fucking queer. You fucking bitch. You disgusting, poor, piece of shit. You monster. “You disgusting, greedy, no-good Amerikan death-sucker” (WSB). Understand that you suffer, and that you aren’t alone. You are part of a vast community who laugh and share and steal and hurt and cry. You do these things. My writing is these things. If you read what I write and it makes you shift in your seat, it makes your skin crawl, it makes you want to read it some other time, or never, then I’ve done my bit: I’ve caused you to feel something. We avoid being uncomfortable at any cost- well, be uncomfortable! Examine it! Why the fuck should you feel uncomfortable with something you’ve felt, you’ve seen, you’ve experienced? Examine it, and transcend the urge to comment on it. You’re human. Fucking act like it.
Language is a disease. It tells you that there are bad things and good things. I’m here to tell you that you are a thing, and everything else is a thing, and that’s all there is to it. There is no good or bad. Just things telling you that other things said this about that. Language makes this happen. Language makes you uncomfortable because there are words describing comfort and its inverse. If we just felt these things, noted them and experienced them, they wouldn’t be half as bad as you construct them to be. Stop defining everything. Just start experiencing.
