Joan Retallack's poems remind me of the necessity of allowing "negative" feelings (this label implies a value judgement) to emerge in the poem. The words of everyday life, the thoughts of everyday life, are no more "representative" of that the experience of life is than a random listing of current magazines. What is "current" is largely illusory, a projection based on a number of largely unconsciously held, socially determined, assumptions. Besides this, the "unfolding" of lilfe from birth. to youth, to middle age, to old age is perhaps also somewhat illusory. Although events appear to us in a consecutive fashion, we learn early on of the reality of what the whole of life includes which encompasses aging and dying. Attention to the innumerable, constantly emerging erphphanies, demands and frustrations of everyday life also shields us from focusing for very long on an overview. Ambitious plans. fantasies, memories, disappointments, hungers, frutstrations, constantly lead consciousness away from an "aerial" or overall view and towards forcusing on the significance of emerging events for the next upcoming sequence of actions.
(4/7/92)

The "key" in which you tell a tale is the equivalent to the "key" in music. It's a tone of voice and an attiude, combined.
(4/22/92)

You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
Joseph Jourbet

Indifference to poetry is oneof the most conspicuous characteristics of the human race.
Robert Lynd

Habits are fitst cobwebs, then cables.
Spanish Proverb.
(4/22/92)