A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (3)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was concerned with experimentation in my writing. However, even then I was still concerned with the poet as witness, writing from a Surrealistic poetic sensibility, writing that is mostly narrative, and an approach to writing that is “shamanic.”
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The experimental poetry that preoccupied my writing from age eighteen to my mid-twenties was an attempt to circumvent the ego. It was an attempt to write original poems by eliminating the ego’s presence; to enter an oceanic, mystical, non-ego state of mind by either entering a trance state, or by doing experiments in randomness in which the ego couldn’t intervene. That was my motive in experimenting in writing, that was my intuitive approach to writing poetry; it was never to be avant-garde, never to be innovative or daring, never to be cutting-edge, never to be popular. When it didn’t work using the experimental methods I was trying, I dropped it. My concerns in poetry have never been the concerns of most other poets who were experimental or innovative in their work.
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I had two premises on which my early poetry was based. I wondered if experimentation in poetry, mostly in the way of randomness, could produce new and original poems, and I also wondered if I could write from an altered state of consciousness. These experiments included using William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique in which an original text is cut into pieces with a pair of scissors and then reassembled randomly, producing a text that juxtaposes the original words and phrases in a new way. I experimented in automatic writing and other experiments I thought would circumvent the ego. I was also interested in John Cage’s work, sound or performance poetry, simultaneous readings of different texts, and concrete or visual poetry. I was interested in the Dadaists, the Surrealists, concrete and sound poetry. Eventually, I began to realize that these experiments, while interesting, did not address my concerns in writing or produce the desired results.
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My experiments in poetry were part of my apprenticeship as a poet. In my early writing I was attempting to move away from the conditioned ego and I thought I could do this by altering my consciousness. In retrospect, I can see that these experiments are evidence that the inner psychological or spiritual being has always been central to my work as a poet from when I began to write poetry to the present.
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