Everything is poetry (with Dr. Jim Peterson)

0:00Oh, hello, welcome to It's All Poetry. Where in each episode we talk about one word in-depth with one guest. I'm your host, Nicole Cudiier. This is going to be a bit of a flash season. We will have five or six episodes, each one talking to a mentor in my life, someone that I have learned the most from over the years. You will get to meet my Pilates instructor, my favorite creativity coach, my favorite notion coach, the person I have learned the most about copywriting from, and also my college poetry professor. This season is really meaningful to me, and I am so excited to introduce you to these people if you haven't heard of them before. We'll also be launching our second cohort of the launch line in the copy poetic studio soon. This is a microgroup offer where you will get to work directly with me on writing a

1:03launch email sequence that is perfectly you while also being set up to sell really well. You can learn more about that offer and get on the wait list at copypoetics.com. Okay, let's get started with today's episode. Hi, Jim. I'm so excited to have you here. Let me go. Well, I'm excited to do this. It sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah. For everyone listening, so I have Jim Peterson with me today, and this is a very special episode for me because it's a season on mentors. So I've been chatting with a lot of my mentors, and Jim Peterson, Dr. Peterson, Professor Peterson, is probably the number one mentor in my life. We've known each other for 20 years. You were my college? Yeah, at least my college writing professor who got me into writing, got me into poetry.

2:07Jim is a poet and fiction writer. I don't think I'm going to be able to list all the places you've been published, but poetry, Georgia review, poetry Northwest, a bunch of them. And how many books do you have now, actually? Ten. Ten. Ten published in eight of them are poetry, and one of them is a novel and one is a collection of short stories, which you know very well. Yeah. So Jim has been very meaningful in my life, and I'm so excited to introduce everybody to you. Jim, is there anything else you want people to know about you before we chat about our word? I guess not. I get the fact that I was a teacher for, I don't know, probably 40 years. And yeah, just so I'm always excited to talk about the creative process, however that's manifesting. Yeah. It's sort of at the center of my mind most of the time. Yeah. And the word we're talking about today is poet poetry.

3:10So we're going to get into it, which is fun actually because the podcast is called It's All Poetry, implying that everything is poetry, but we've never done an episode on the word poetry. So this is a very special episode for lots of reasons. But Jim, do you know, do you know your earliest memory of poetry? Like when did it first come into your life? I do. At least I, I guess it's fair to say this is my earliest memory. I'm sure I had earlier experiences in grammar school, you know, but this goes back to grammar school. And you know, I'm talking pretty early grammar school. I was, you know, really learning how to make, let right, I was learning how to write. But the teacher at a certain point wanted us all to write a little poetry book. So we wrote our, doodifully wrote our points out. When we got to a certain number, I don't know what it was eight or 10 points or something like that.

4:11She then proceeded to teach us to make a book of points. So we drew, we drew a cover and, you know, had art on the cover and all of that. And we put it all together and then lo and behold, we had our own little collection of points. And in a sense, I mean, I was so excited about that. I enjoyed doing that problem more than anything else we had done. And I enjoyed it so much that I just kept doing it for the rest of my life pretty much. Yeah. So that's my earliest memory of poetry, consciously thinking about poetry. Yeah. I had some good teachers early on. I do feel like creative expressions, creative paths, like it helps to have someone when you're young tell you that you're good at it or to give you encouragement in it. Yeah. And give you a chance to achieve a look something, you know, to actually make a book that

5:12you can take home and show your parents and all of that, you know. Yeah. I remember winning a poetry contest when I was in third grade. I want to say, I don't know if I ever told you that. I don't know if you know that. I don't remember that. That was pretty monumental in me, just keeping writing. It was for dare. Do you remember the dare program? That sounds familiar, but I don't. Of course, remember, you came along a lot later than I did. Well, dare is like not. It doesn't exist anymore, but it was something to keep us from using drugs. Like it was a lot of anti-marijuana. Yeah. Portray instead of marijuana, right? Portray instead of marijuana. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And what, this feels like a big question, but what does the word mean to you now? Like how do you, how does it show up in your life? Poetry, the word poetry. Mm-hmm. Well, of course I'm writing, I'm writing poetry pretty constantly.

6:14Yeah. So I'll start there. At a certain point, I fell in love with writing poetry. I mean, I wrote it at first to impress a girlfriend. I mean, I got more serious about it like in high school. And also to express feelings, high school kids, a lot of them I did, felt alienation. There was a sense of alienation. And the world was messed up somehow. And I didn't, you know, just poetry that kind of allowed me to express those feelings. And I got more serious about it as I went through high school. And so it, yeah, it was an outlet. I had a creative tendency. There was an artist in me, but I couldn't do anything else. I couldn't dance. I couldn't sing. I could draw stick figures. It was about it. Then I loved music a lot, but I didn't play any instruments.

7:19And poetry was something that I could do privately. I didn't have to share it. I could, but I didn't have to. So if I had been to outward with it, my father, I'm sure he would have made fun of me. And it would have been a problem. And later, when I got off to college and became more open about writing poetry, he did make fun of me and told me the, you know, questioned why I was getting. So deeply into that when he wanted me to, you know, take over his business is what he wanted me to take. And I didn't have any interest in doing that. So poetry was, now that I'm thinking about it, poetry was a way that I rebelled. It was a way for me to sort of rebel and to have something I could, it was at the heart of my rebellion, which was poetry, which I stood up against the values of making money.

8:20Money was the most important thing. Portry seemed to be accenting other kinds of sometimes mysterious values, almost spiritual values, things that were not so concrete, you know, about so much about achievement as they were the quality of ones being, you know, and things of that sort in the world. So yeah, that will get us started, but I will say this other thing that people use the word poetry, you know, they'll see somebody running and they're a beautiful runner and they say, oh, that's poetry. You know, so poetry now can actually be applied just to express a deeper appreciation for the beauty of something that's poetry, you know. So I kind of like that meaning also. Yeah, I do too. Yeah. What was your father's business? I feel like I should know, but I don't remember.

9:21My father was, he started out, he was very smart guy, never finished high school. He started an insurance business. And after a while, he saw these other guys making money in the real estate business and he tried his hand at that and that's where he really became successful. He continued the insurance kind of as a lesser thing, but he got deeper and deeper into real estate. He taught himself to be an architect. So he started, he learned how to draw house plans and he started building houses and housing developments and then shopping centers and he was quite successful. Yeah. Yeah. I have trouble seeing you as anything but a poet. Well, yeah, a poet, and I felt like teaching fitted me pretty well, but no, and then I saw my father so stressed out about all that was going on and he was not a terribly healthy

10:23man. He died when he was 59. And you know, I thought, you know, life is stressful anyway. I don't think I want to get into a business where people are thinking, going to be thinking I'm cheating them and all kinds of stuff that he had to deal with all the time. I just didn't want it. So I was rather wrangle with your emotions. Yes. Yes. And to my father's credit, when he really realized that I was not going to come into the business, he supported my decision. But he never, I'm not sure he ever fully understood it. But he supported me and helped me. So. Yeah. Good. Okay. Are you ready to get into definitions? Sure. Okay. So the way that this works is we're going to walk backwards through time. So we'll look at the modern definition. Okay. Talk about how we feel about it. And then we'll follow the word back as far as we can. Okay. Keep talking about how we feel about it.

11:23That sounds great. Yeah. So I want to in order to do this, I want to look at the modern definition as if it's not final, like it's a rough draft. So we are allowed to be like, I don't like this or I like it. Okay. Okay. So we're going to look at both the word poetry and poet because they're interesting together. So the first definition in Merriam Webster, the modern dictionary, is metrical writing or verse. Oh. That's it. That's a simple. But the second definition in the dictionary is one that I'll read slowly. Okay. And I'm curious on your thoughts on this one in particular. Okay. Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound and rhythm. How's that sound?

12:23Well, I may have to ask you to read it again, but I mean, I think it's pretty good. It's not, it's lacking some things that I might want to say. And it's also defining poetry maybe a little too tightly in some ways. Yeah. So read it one more time. Sure. Yeah. It's also a very long sentence. So it's like hard to. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A concentrated imaginative awareness of experience. Stop. A concentrated, say it again, a concentrated awareness of experience. A concentrated imaginative. An imaginative experience. An imaginative awareness of experience. I think that's interesting. I mean, you can debate every single word if you want to.

13:24Yeah, we can. But there is, I mean, if you're writing it, yes, there's a certain concentration that that happens. There's one experience, possibly, one moment that the poem is focusing on. Not all poems have to do that. There's all kind of poetry, but that's, that is kind of especially contemporary times. That seems to, I mean, the epic poem, maybe that wouldn't fit so well for an epic poem, right? It's 300 pages long. It's like a novel. So it's just porn. But I like that pretty well. What about you? Yeah. I mean, concentrated imaginative awareness. I mean, yeah, I can see, to me, it feels like a hard word to define. And I can see like the attempt here. And I don't know if I could imagine a better one besides like this, like this, this, this like I'm a picturing the shape of a poem. And it's just like you're concentrating your imaginative awareness on this, on the shape.

14:28Right. Yeah. And then so to continue it, it's in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response. Okay, stop there. Yeah. Again, I can see how that will be a useful definition for some people. I think that's impinging a little bit on the creative process for me. In other words, it's less intentional than that makes it sound. Yes. It makes it sound like the outcome, like getting the emotional responses the purpose. It's like, okay, I want, I want them to feel what would it, what would be a joy? I want them to feel joy. So now I'm composing this poem with that in mind. I don't know a single serious poet who does that.

15:30I can't think of anybody who would do it. It's more like what is the poem, what does it want to say? Yeah. Right. So it's more like the poem is finding its way towards something that I don't know what it is as the writer. This is a part of when you start describing creative process, a part that a lot of people go, what are you talking about? But if you do a lot of this, I mean, I've been doing it since the 1960s. Well, if I go back to that first book, I wrote back in the grammar school back to 1950s. You know, you've been able to realize that you're not in so much in control. It's more like you're present. They use that definition, he uses the word awareness. It's more like you just open yourself to being more aware. You've got the vocabulary.

16:31You've got those are the words you're going to work with. That's all you got. And those are going to come to you. And some, and I want to say some idea comes to you. Kind of it's a kind of an idea, but it's more, almost more of a feeling. Oh, oh, you know, the first thing that you get down a few words, all of a sudden more words related to that somehow or in contrast to that somehow come to you and you just start happening. It's just like you're the instrument of something else. Yeah. It's kind of like that for me. And this definition, I don't think leaves space for that. Not really. It doesn't sound like it quite does. It actually, like, and having that specific emotional response in mind is actually more a can, I think, to marketing copy. Like, when you want the outcome, you want them to feel a certain emotion so that they take an action or buy something or. Right. Yeah. Now, I'm like, is there a way to make marketing copy more channeled?

17:36I liked it. Yeah, I think we could absolutely find a way to do that. I think it is happening, actually. Yeah. More than we think. I mean, we could talk about this. This gets more into philosophy out. I don't know whether you want to go there or not, but. I wouldn't expect to have a conversation with you that didn't go into philosophy. Well, I mean, if you want to take this as a, you want to go to, to an extreme degree with this. Now, the question you're asking is, do I have free will? Right. And so in other words, is everything just happening? Or am I making some things happen? Am I determining with my intention, you know? So there are several veins of philosophy that would say that there is no such thing as free will. Actually, science is starting to say this now. The, the, the physicists, the quantum physicists are starting to move in this direction. How? The, the neuroscientists are starting to say that everything is just happening. We only think we are doing it.

18:39It's just a, it's just the thought in our head that I'm the one who did it. But it's actually even that thought that I'm the one who did it is just happening. Well, now I don't know how to discern. Right, right. So, so not everybody can go there, but, yeah, I want to go there to that degree. But that discovering that philosophy and any sort of examining it and seeing, testing it out in my own life to see if that was true or not, the more you look at it, the more it feels true. So, even when you think you're being more intentional, your, everything is still just happening in, in that stream of life's energy unfolding, it's just unfolding. We just happen to be thinkers. A dog would never think that it was doing anything. The dog, the dog is something that's happening rather than somebody doing something.

19:43And so we human beings, because we think we're the ones, of course, who are doing it. Well, I'll leave it there because we're, oh, it's such a big, such a big can we're opening. Right, we're opening. And those warms are all over the place. Everywhere. We can go back more to the poetry. But I think, I think the poet just kind of acknowledges that and accepts that, that he or she is, is the instrument. And something is, is moving through that instrument and manifesting as poems. Something is moving through. Yeah. Well, have you, have you read Elizabeth Gilbert? Have we talked about her in big magic and? I haven't read her in a long time, but I have read, yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, she talks about like the poem existing outside of the self and like the poem kind of comes to you when you're ready for it. And if you don't catch it, like any creative process, right?

20:45And if you don't catch it, it might go to someone else. So. Oh, I don't know how I feel about that. Then you become hyper-sign. You're just waiting for the next one all the time. Yeah. Well, you know, like when a line comes to you and you feel like if you don't write it down fast enough, it will, it will just go. It does. It does. It's like a dream. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the third definition is something I think you will like based on what you said earlier, but definition three of poetry in the modern dictionary is something like into poetry, especially in beauty of expression. So like you were talking about the runner, right? I mean, poetry or the poetry of dance is the example they give. Right. Okay. Before we move back in time, I just want to read, well, we'll look at a definition of poet and then we'll look at some synonyms. So the definition of poet, well, the first one is one who writes poetry. So we don't have to talk in depth about that one. But the second one is one, such as a creative artist of great imaginative and expressive

21:48capabilities and a special sensitivity to the medium. Jeremy, who does the research for the podcast, he brought up a quote that he found that said, only poets read poetry. What do you think? Well, in a sense, that's true. But you see, since I mean now is that everyone's a poet. So anyone who reads poetry is automatically a poet, but they were already a poet before they read the poetry. So I don't, I don't. Yeah. I do think everybody has some poetry in them, has poetry in them. But again, I'm not sure I'm talking about necessarily something that's written down. But just a sense of what was in that earlier definition, an awareness of the intense presence

22:56to this moment, to a moment, and an intense awareness in the moment that suddenly opens the world up to them. And now they're experiencing the world more, more directly. They're there, they're seeing more and more detail in a sense. They're seeing more of what's happening because they're not so much in their head, they more in the seeing. You become the seeing, most of the time we are the thinking. And nothing wrong with that. But if you are the thinking, now you're anything you're seeing, you're seeing it through the thinking. But if you're thinking stops for a moment and you're actually seeing something, everybody experiences this, you know, you're sitting out on your front yard in a bobcat or in the cross-infrared.

23:57Everything, all your mind stops completely. And your eyes go wide open, you know, that expression, you know, and you're seeing, and you're seeing becomes very clear and intense. Right? And you're not defining anything. You're just seeing. And that intensity of experience to me is at the heart of the poetry that I particularly like. And then the thinking comes after and we make up stories about where that bobcat is coming from and where it's going. Exactly. But now the thinking, when it comes back, I mean, this is what happens for the artist or maybe the writer mainly. When the thinking comes back, it's more in tune with what was seen in that more radical way. It's in tune with that intense seeing now, but if you never get to that, if you don't have that, any of that radical, like people who are always on their phones, always on

24:58their phones, always in their head, headphone, headphone, it's all just that. Then they're not seeing or hearing anything around them, you know. And so it's hard for them to get more in tune with the sort of the actuality of this, sort of beautiful presence of this moment, this very moment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, sensory writing too is what we talk about. Even in marketing, we talk about sensory writing and how the writing that is the seeing, the writing that is the senses and not the interpretation is often much more powerful. Yeah. Some synonyms of the word poet are really fun. There is, of course, bard and minstrel, which both imply music. Different in songs. Oh, I have written a few, not very good songs. I've written some songs, yes. We also have author, of course, racon twos and spinner of yarns.

25:59Well, the poet can be pretty much all of those things. I tend to be a narrative poet, not exclusively, but I tend to be a narrative poet. So I am a spinner of yarns for sure. And my yarns are constructed out of things that I have actually seen or experienced to some degree. So the actual experiencing, sensing and experiencing is like the products of the cake. It's the flower and so on. But it's how, that's what this thing is that is using me to write the poem. Those are the ingredients that it has at its disposal that are relative to this particular person. My experience, the experience of this body mind, experience, the DNA, everything goes into making this particular body mind.

27:00It's what's available to that magic thing that we're thinking about that uses the poet as the instrument to manifest this beautiful thing. Or this interest, I don't think it doesn't have to be beautiful in the usual sense of that word. It might be, it might actually be disturbing or something that you wouldn't necessarily apply the word beauty to. But it's, it's, it cuts, it sort of cuts deeper than just ordinary language. It cuts deeper into the person's psyche who's reading it in some way, hopefully. I, I will say, I think as I've gotten older too, my favorite visual art has been the art that makes me go, do I like that? I'm not sure. And usually like that's a sign that I will end up really, really loving it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. So you look at some art and you see it for, you know, you look at it for 30 seconds and

28:03that's the last time you need to see it. You don't ever think about it again. But you look at some art and whether it's beautiful or something else, you realize you haven't seen it yet. You haven't seen all that it's offering. You get some part, you're all of a sudden you go, oh, and you catch, you catch another layer of what it's doing. And you realize you could stand there for a long time. And you keep discovering more and more things. Which is what really, really cool art does, I think. Yeah. And also why I think poetry can be so frustrating to read. Oh, yeah. Okay. Let's jump back 200 years. Oh, yeah. So we'll look at the definition from the 1828, Mary Webster dictionary. Oh, I'm going to speak. Part of the reason that this one's fun to look at is because it was the first one that Webster was was working on. So sorry, 1828 Webster dictionary. And he was really trying to separate like American English from British English with the creation of the dictionary. It took him like 20 years to write. So I like to be aware of his presence and his intentions when we look at these definitions.

29:08So poet in this 1828 dictionary is the author of a poem, of course, the inventor or maker of a metrical composition. And then he goes on to say, a poet is a maker as the word signifies. And he who cannot make that is invent half his name for nothing. I don't know if I fully understand it. So I'm hoping you do. I'm going to read it one more time. I guess I guess he who is not a poet. Yes. No, who he who cannot make has the name poet for nothing, the name poet. I think that's how I interpret that. Yeah. Go ahead and read it again if you want to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is a maker as the word signifies. And he who cannot make that is invent half his name for nothing. Right. I guess I don't know if he's saying like has the name poet for nothing or like has his

30:09own name for nothing like which shouldn't even exist if he's not a maker. Let's give webster some credit and then say that he's not wanting to erase everyone. It's not a, it's not a poet. Yeah. So I, well, yeah. I sort of resist turning the poet into something too special. I really think people turn the poetry because it is a way to bridge the outer world with the inner world in a, in a creative way. It's a way to bridge the two. What we consider the outer in the inner world. There's a debate, of course, as to whether there's any separation between those two or not. But the poet is, yeah, it is connecting.

31:11That's not the quite the right word, but it's connecting emotion and feeling to something that is outer. You could say the language is exterior to, you know, the poet is using elements in the, what we call the concrete world, the physical world to tell a story or to write a lyric poem that draws forth the reader's emotional response feeling and also it might draw forth intellectual response too. If there's no response, then you just kind of turn the page, you know, you turn the page, you know, and because what you want, I know what I want to have happen is I want to be moved. And when I find a poet that is doing that to me, it's like, oh, wait a minute, okay. I can sit down and slow down and read this now slowly and really take it in.

32:11And I try to, whatever poet I read, I'm looking for that. And if I don't get it right away, I'll give them more opportunities. And often it suddenly clicks. What they're doing clicks with me suddenly. And now I'm getting it. And now it opens up, you know, but for some points I read, I can never get it. And here's what's really bad. I do get it and I go, I don't care. You know, what they're actually bringing forth is not something I'm interested in necessarily or whatever reason. So there's a lot of, we make room for lots of different kinds of poets because people are looking for something different, you know, not everybody's looking for the same thing. Yeah. Well, Webster does get a bit sassy later in the definition where he says, many right verses who cannot be called poets. Yes. Well, yeah, again, the poetry poets want to be special.

33:20I mean, it's true. Some people are gifted and talented and write these amazingly beautiful things. And some people can make rams, but they're clunky or they're, are they're modeling, sentimental and modeling and, you know, and so we have these judgments we pass. The kind of poet that I think he's talking about, but he elevates him too much in the way he talks about him. This arrogance, I don't like the arrogant part of it, but there are poets who do have the ability to work subtly on the reader, not so obviously. And they get allows the reader to discover, you know, so the other kind that he's talking about, the versifier rather than the poet is, is making everything obvious.

34:22Yeah. It's just telling the reader how to feel and think. Whereas the other poet is exploring something. Perhaps doesn't know themselves how to feel, I think, yet, but it's in the exploration that, that the point is that it suddenly comes to a kind of fruition for both the poet and the reader. Yeah. Yeah. Robert Frost was the best at this. He said, in one of his brief essays on poetry, he said, he said, no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No, no, no, no laughter in the writer. No laughter in the reader. Name, put anything in, they can plug anything in there. He was saying that if you aren't, if the poem is said, and you, you as you're writing it aren't weeping, you're not likely to, to bring that sadness out of the reader. You've got to be in the poem that way. You're embodying the poem in that sense. Yeah. Or it's embodying you.

35:22Yeah. Yes. As we discussed. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I think I feel, I feel like Webster's being a little judgmental too. So. Yeah. I don't want to say that. Well, we'll chalk it up there. It was his time. Yes. When he lived. When he lived. Yeah. Yeah. And then under poetry, he adds, this term is also applied to the language of excited imagination and feeling. So in addition to being composition and verse and poetry, it's also just excited imagination and feeling. That's interesting. He's almost getting to our definition of not intending. It's just like, it's just a burst, an explosion of, of, of feeling and thought of certain kinds manifesting on the page in a sense. So that word excited, I think back in those days, how to tend to see to connect to, well,

36:26it had two ways it could go. It could go to something kind of spiritual. The excitation of a spiritual, you know, something, something not physical, not the usual kind of movement of thought or feeling inspiration, let's say. So there was, I take that to mean inspiration. Yeah. I think what are you talking about? I think at the time, yeah, that's more, it's more than just what we think of as like, I'm excited for the trip I'm going on tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. You ready to get into the deeper etymology? Go wherever you want to go. Yeah. This is my favorite part. I love looking like at the, so if we jump even further back in time, well, before we do that, let's look at a few like beats. So there are a few like moments in time where poet or poetry of it, it took on another meaning or something was added to the definition. So in 1930, there was one of these beats with poet, Maudi, which entered English as literally

37:32the cursed poet. So a poet that is insufficiently appreciated by their contemporaries. And this is coined, I guess, in reference to, oh, I don't have more info on this person, Verlaine in 1844. Yeah. Do you know? Do you know about that? Okay. Who's Verlaine? Well, he was a French poet. Okay. A curse who was not appreciated. You know, he became very appreciated maybe after his death. And I just, I never thought about it in those terms. But I mean, you could name a lot of people who fit this definition, people who did become famous, but it was after they had died, who lived in poverty and kept working and writing and writing and writing and never made any money on it. They worked other jobs, but they were called to write poetry, not their fiction writers

38:32that are like this too. Many, I mean, many, some of them great writers who really weren't discovered until after they died. I mean, Franz Kafka is an example who now is a major literary world literary figure. You know, published almost nothing when he wrote. And in fact, he was so a naughty about it that when he knew he was dying, he told his best friend who had read everything that he'd written to burn it. And his best friend didn't. Good. And after Kafka died, his best friend started getting them all of it published. So now pretty much everything that Kafka wrote that was in manuscript form has become published. Yeah. So sometimes it takes some other person to help the process at that point, at the end point, to reach people.

39:33I mean, I can think of a lot of people. Yeah, Dickinson had that too, right? Emily Dickinson. Absolutely. She published maybe ten points during her lifetime. And they were not well received, particularly. And yet she's one of our greatest poets, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I visited her house once. Oh, yeah. The Massachusetts, yeah. They have a museum. Could you go up into her bedroom? Yes. Did they let you go up there? I think so. Yeah, because I went just after they had done some, they had been doing some restoration, like a really long restoration. And they reopened it. I want to say in 2022, I went or 23, not that long ago, just a couple of years. Yeah. She was interesting. Tell me if I'm right. They may have told you this. You may have seen it. You know, she wasn't publishing anything, but she had a feeling about what she was writing that it was maybe going to be meaningful in some point.

40:35And she took every point, she put it into a sheath, a protective sheath, and stored it in her drawers and the drawers and places that she had in her bedroom. And they found all of these hundreds upon hundreds of these points. And letters, a lot of her letters were preserved as well. So she was aware, or at least was suspicious, that people weren't getting it yet and that somebody was going to start getting it, which is exactly what happened. Yeah. And that's so that is a bit of like what we were talking about earlier with the like a bit of propheticism or the poet just like being channeled or jumped through. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So if we go back even further, one interesting note, we'll see what we make of this. But in old English, they actually didn't use the word poet or poetry. They used a word that's pronounced shop.

41:38It doesn't survive to this day, but shop is now the ancestor of the modern word scoff. But it's no longer used to mean poetry. That was interesting, but scoff somehow that used to mean poetry now means scoff. What do you do with that? Does that mean anything to you? I don't know. I mean, I guess it's interesting that it's like, it makes me think of more of like a reading poetry out loud, right? If it's connected to this idea of like oral, an oral tradition of poetry. Right. I could see the connection between the idea of a poem and then scoffing. Or the poem is scoffing it something. Yes. You know, some person, usually some government official or leader, you know, the poet scoffs at the leader, using verse to do that. Or like you said, the reader can mock the poem as they read it. It can scoff at the poem.

42:40He's scoffing and his or her attitude towards the poem in the act of reading it. And so on. There are a lot of ways to kind of play with that. Yeah. Because if you think of Shakespeare, right? Or like if we're going old English, like Shakespeare, I'm sure there's scoffing at the plays. And also the play is definitely scoffing at the listeners, the readers, the participants. Definitely. Yes. There's a lot of humor, sort of satirical humor in which scoffing is taking place. Yeah. Oh, if we go back to the early 14th century, from like 1200 to the early 14th century, it starts to show up as a name, a surname. Oh, really? How it? Yeah. Oh. Oh, there's a TV series. Yeah. A woman, a woman detective whose name is Poet. Oh, I don't think I know this. I'd have to look it up. I can't. I've watched some episodes.

43:41They're kind of fun. I'd have to just see if you can find it. It's like on Netflix or something like that. Okay. Yeah. That's a good look. Yeah. But I always thought, wow, that's an interesting name. But that's the only time I've ever heard that name used. But now that we're talking about it, it does make sense. I can imagine somebody naming their child Poet. Yeah. It is a kind of a load, though. I know. Now you've got to be clever with words or you're, you know. I know. What if they just want to play tennis? I know. Oh, don't look up to their name. Well, then we can scoff at them. Yes. No, I think it actually would make more sense for someone named Poet to be like some athlete. Yeah. Well, then we talk about the poetry of beautiful tennis. Because if you're watching a tennis match, you're, you played, you've played tennis. Why do I associate you with tennis? I used to play a lot.

44:41Okay. Yeah. There's poetry in tennis, don't you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, I mean, that's why if you're watching on TV, they'll slow things way down. So as you can see this athlete flowing through space, it's almost like dance. It really is. Yes. And some of them are just amazing gifted athletes. And they're just kind of so fluidly flowing through space to get to a shot. So that's, yeah, that's the poetry of tennis. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then we get to our path, right? So we have Old French poet, Latin poet, Greek poetess and all of those essentially mean a maker, an author, a poet or if we're looking at the verb, right, to make, to create, to compose. So if you go back, there's other variations of like, poin, poin, I'm not saying them right probably, but yeah, at its root, we've got to make, create, compose.

45:44Simple. It's just a builder. And then if we go back, the furthest we can go, the root is actually quay. The, sorry, to give more context. This is the proto-indo-European root. So it's the root that is shared among all these European languages. So it's quay, which means to pile up, to build, to make. Okay. Yeah. Kind of like the idea of maker. Yeah. Again, it opens the word up to me so that it can mean, it can apply to a lot of things. And we could say maybe that it has something to do with the spirit in which something is being made. Uh-huh. You know, the kind of exploratory nature of it, the openness, the wanting to go deeper than the surface, you know, in the making.

46:45Yeah. And so on. Uh-huh. So we could, we could, we could go in those directions. But I like that. I mean, I know furniture makers that I basically consider them poets, they make these beautiful things. Uh-huh. And, uh, and, but that, that you can see if you watch them working the care and attention they're giving, they're absolute connection to that moment of making. Yeah. And, in a sense, they're listening to the wood if they're working with wood. Hmm. The wood is speaking to them and helping them locate something there that was not there before. You know? Yeah. So that same principle, if it's a principle, applies, I think, to any kind of making. Yeah. Well, and what I, what I kind of like is it's supporting our, our theory that there is this external, like inspiration, something, right? Because the, that makes the poet simply the maker, but it's not like in more modern definitions,

47:46we have a lot more like creativity, imagination, right? Like a concentrated imagination. But in the root, it is, it is the, the role in the process is the one that's building. Or piling up was an interesting one to me. Right. Like, we're piling the meaning, but the meaning and the, the inspiration, it's, it seems like it's coming from somewhere else. Well, just, let's, for a second, like sitting here talking right now, I'm watching you. I, I guess we have listeners, not, we don't have, we're seeing it's right. But yeah, just listening. Just listening. Well, it, in a sense, it works, but either way, but as I'm watching you and listening to you, if I turn my attention in a certain way, I can, and you might, maybe it's imagine that there, there is a force moving into your brain, into your mind, into your heart, into your whole mind body system.

48:50I can, I can imagine that energy moving and it's being transformed by who you are, who you are, but, but, but, but that original energy is always still the original energy. So you can take up, you can take a, a, a gold ring. Just take a gold ring, 100% gold. Yeah. Right? Well, it's gold. It's never not gold. Right? Yes. But the maker can make it into something else. It turns into something, but it's never not the gold. So in a sense, that energy, that raw energy is coming through you. It's always still that raw energy, but yet it's being moved, managed in some, in what ways, that you're not necessarily conscious of, but, but it's, it's moving. It's a movement, I think, through you. And yeah, and you can just kind of imagine it moving, passing through various filters and so on, as it's getting shaped and, and interpreted and, and yeah, it's a, it's

49:57discovering itself in a sense. Yeah. And then reinterpreting once it's being reinterpreted once it's read too. Absolutely. And then there's another process there. Yeah. Yeah. Now the, another person comes and all that energy now is moving into that and, yeah, and they can't see it exactly the way the maker sees it. They can't, because there's too, too much variation going on there. Yeah. You know, in that other person. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's also worth chatting about, this is kind of contested or not agreed upon, whether this is also a root of poetry, but there's another definition of the proto-indo-European root, quay. So it's the third definition of that. So we have to build, to pile up, which is what I already shared, which is where poem they know comes from. But there's another definition of quay, which is to see, observe, perceive. Oh, cool. Yeah.

50:58Typically, it acts of valuing or honoring. And even though it's contested that that's a part of poetry, I feel like it is. Because that makes sense to me. I'm with you 100%. Yeah. Yeah. To the degree that memory is, is original perception taking form in a sense and being sort of held onto, perhaps unconsciously. There it is. It's in you. And all of a sudden, somebody says something and that memory is triggered in you. Now it comes back, comes in and the images, you start creating images in you that call that energy up, that sort of recreate that energy in you, right? So this is, poetry has to you is using that. Yeah. A lot. I mean, that's what else, you know, what else? So it's, so it's, it's original form is perception.

51:59Uh-huh. It's, it's perception without interpretation. Which is what you were saying earlier about the bot cat. It's, it's right. It's just the pure perception. Hopefully because that is wide eyed and full of all. It's, it's the kind of perception that's, you know, it's vaccinated. Yeah. And that kind of, that kind of perception, it, it comes into it within it and it, it really shakes us in a way. Uh-huh. And, and I think that artists is definitely drawing off of that big time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure there's a reason it's contested that is to do with linguistics, that, that I don't know, but to me, it, it feels like part of it. Um, yeah. Let's, look at some cousin words. So what these words are, are words that share the same proto-independent, Indo-European root. So they share the quay root. Um, one of them is posee.

53:00That makes sense. Oh, yeah. You mean the flower. Yeah. Yeah. Posee. Well, there is a word posee, posee, p-o-e-s-i-e, I think. Oh, this one is p-o-e-s-y. Is that the flower? Posee, posee. No, I think posee, really, I know that's it. P-o-e-s-y, I think it's, is, what I'm thinking of. Which is, I think, just another word for poetry, an older word for poetry. Posee, yeah. Posee. Um, we also have an-a-ma-ta-pia, which makes sense, yeah. This is the sounds, right? Yeah. Well, it's good. Yeah. It's a word that sounds like what it is. Yes. Oh, yes, yes. Like, pop. Like, splash. Yeah. Yes. Um, we also have curate shares, the root. Curate. And curious. It. Curious makes a lot of sense to me. Mm-hmm. Curate. Do you have a definition of curate right in front of you there?

54:02I don't, but I could pull on up. It is. I have the internet. Curate is to be selective, right? And to choose and to. Yeah. I, when I hear curate, I think of- I see how that makes sense. A museum? Curate? Like choosing the art that goes into a museum. Right. To select, organize, and look after items in a collection. Right. Right. That makes some sense to me as the poetic process. And that's since there is a curating because a lot more this energy that's coming, it's going to bring a lot more than we can use in a particular point. Mm-hmm. So there has to be some curation of what's coming in. Yeah. And, uh, now that's a whole different part of the discussion. What is it? What is it in us that sort of learns how to curate what's coming in? So that a particular point is a curated collection. And a lot was left out. A lot was left out. Yeah.

55:03Yeah. I mean, I feel like it comes from our desire to make patterns and to tell stories. Right. Like I think of a curated collection or like an album. Right. There's usually a whole arc, a whole story that, like when you choose, I mean, you probably, you know more than me because you've put together books of poetry, but you're thinking of a whole story, right? When you're organizing them. Yeah. Yeah. Do you usually know that while you're writing or after, is that? Well, uh, I'm thinking back now. Only one of them was truly a single unfolding story. And that's the tow-headed stone-thrower. Yeah. It was unified by my relationship with my deceased wife. That was the unifying. And that, so that, and it was more or less chronological. Yeah. Uh, but none of the other collections are anything like chronological or they're not that kind

56:04of story. Uh, but they have, they have some sort of, it's very intuitive. And they do have the similarity to story in the sense that I can feel that energetically, they're rising and falling. Mm-hmm. If that makes any sense. Yeah. I have a sense of what poems need to be near the end and what the final poem is and what poems need to be at the beginning and, uh, and so on. And it's, uh, it's almost hard to talk about for me. Yeah. Uh, and when I see people start nailing that down and having a formula for it, I stop listening. I don't want to know like that. I want to, I want it to stay more in my feeling sense than in my intellectual sense. So the curation, the curation has to be a marriage of feeling and intellect to some degree. You know, and so it's that marriage, but some people are overbearing on one side or the other. It's all about feeling and only about the art.

57:05It's all about some sort of intellectual gain. And so I think the, the, the poet is an alchemist in a sense that they're, they're bringing that these two energies of being brought together into a confluence, where the, where the feeling and, and thinking, the feeling and intellectualizing are in total service to each other. They're not just one, it's not just one of the other. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like people will be drawn to the one they're most drawn to. Yes. And they're wrongly to do it. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. So there's always about so some, some really fine poets are more in the feeling side and some really fine poets are more in the intellectual side, but all of them have that blend. There's a blend there, I think. Yeah. Of the two, of the two forces. Yeah. Okay. So the, as we start to reach the end of the, the episode, we're going to get some quotes.

58:11So I have some quotes to share with you. And then we'll just chat about them. The first is from Barbara Tuchman, who was an American historian, journalist and author. I think I'm saying the name right. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice. And she says the poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians. That's interesting. Well, I wonder what she means by the word poets in that context. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure what she meant, but the Jeremy did know he, like, what came to his mind was, like, Homer and the Odyssey and the historical accuracy of everything. And like, reading these old poems, kind of like, that's where history comes from or our knowledge of it. Well, the Odyssey is not historical, though. Exactly. I know. But we like, think of it as this. Okay. I think that's exactly what we mean, right? It's not historical text. But we think of like, oh, this is like, you know, the history of what happened here.

59:14History what happened. This is what the world was like, you know. I would love to see that, so I clops. I swear I would. Yeah, me too. But have you seen the movie yet? I haven't. I really want to. Have you? I have not. Yeah. But yeah, you actually did a different opinion, you know. Any movie is going to draw from both sides. But I look forward to seeing it. Yeah. So I've done, got myself off track. What's so what are we talking about from this quote that? Yeah. Well, I think while I read it again, the poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians. Okay. The way that I agree with that, because if you look at it on the surface, let's just taking the Odyssey, for example, no, he's not familiarizing us with history, you know, not an accurate history. But he is familiarizing us with the history of what and how people felt.

1:00:18Yeah. The history of what they were interested in, what they dreamed of. You know, what they felt was important, you know, you know, marry in the Odyssey. It's to some degree about a marriage. You know, what all of those things. So in that sense is telling what is the history of those kinds of qualities. Some poetry is more historical. We suppose. But since history is nothing but memory. And we know that memories, I mean, just to check out your own memory, how fickle it is, how it changes over time. Yeah. You know, there's some question about how accurate what we call history actually is. Yeah. It is somebody interpreting what they're seeing. So it's their interpretation of events. So I like to loosen history up like that.

1:01:20Yeah. And remind us that it's all creation. We're all creating out of memory or out of notes. We might take notes down. But even that isn't as we're writing the notes, that energy is at work, that individualistic portion of that energy is working to interpret through that individual way of seeing. And so even the note taking is just a way of seeing what's happening. Yeah. And to me, to loosen history up like that, and not think that just because it's written down somewhere, even in a history book, that means it's so, you know, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. I think it's good for us. Yeah. Yeah, I think we must, right? We must do that. I do think that sometimes it can be really, it can make a poem or any piece of art really more interesting to look at the historical context too. And to be like, what was going on, you know, what was going on that, that is showing up

1:02:22in themes or even what was going on in this person's life, right? That, that is showing up in this poem. I have a direct experience that I wrote a collection of poems, a resolution of Eve. It's the name of it. And it's based on a series of paintings, not paintings, etchings by Goya, a great, a great artist. And wow. I mean, you look at these, these images, it just, you would not necessarily call them beautiful. They are grotesque and, and frightening and they get into your head. You'll have dreams about them. They're so kind of grotesque. I was so fascinated with them that I decided to write this series of poems on all, there was like 25 of them. And I made an early decision not to read up on about them, not to read any art critics,

1:03:23interpretation of what the painting was meaning or doing. And, but just to let the painting speak to my own psyche and a sense and see what, you know, in that collective unconscious, you know, that phrase of Carl Jung, you know, what it would draw forth. Because I would, I would call these paintings very kind of Jungian, archetypal, just interesting, bizarre figures, beings. You don't have to see them if you've never seen them before. And later, after I'd written the book and it was published as a chap book, as a small collection, I allowed myself to look more at what Gory was doing. And I'm so glad I didn't do it ahead of time. Oh, yeah. Because all that historical context and, you know, the interpretation of the art world is that it's satirical. But his paintings to me are not satirical.

1:04:26They are psychologically bizarre, they're just bizarre. And in that sense, really interesting and kind of, you know, something in me wanted to dance with those paintings. And, yeah, that was a fun project. Yeah. I don't know if I've seen. Oh, okay. Yes, I have seen some of these. I just Googled quickly. Some of them look familiar. The Gory, yes. Yeah. The, oh, I've seen this one. It's Kronos, right? Eating. That is similar. But now, the ones I'm talking about are particular collection called the disparades. Okay. Or the, they're all in one collection. That, that Kronos thing is, is grotesque for sure. Yeah. But it's, it's beautiful and, and also sort of, but also, God, you know, the closer you get to it and really look at it, it's like, oh my God.

1:05:30Is eating his son, is I recall? Yeah. Yeah. I think he is in that one. Yeah. I don't know which son, but I think Kronos in mythology ate a few of his children, so. Yeah. So, you know, it's really getting into something psychological, something, yeah. Can be very disturbing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Another quote for you. I don't know what to make of this one. I'm so curious to hear what you make of it. Before you read it. Yes. I would call Goya a poet. Oh, yeah. Okay. Even though he was not technically a poet. To me, those paintings are saying so much and there's so much, there's so many levels of an impossible interpretation to them. Uh-huh. That to me, they are poetry. You can just look at it. You just keep looking and you keep finding more and more, the longer you look. Yeah. So poetry by definition, like, layers, like, like, like, finding more and more layers,

1:06:30the more you look seems to be an important part. For me, it is. Yeah. I mean, even somebody like Frost, who people think of as a simple part, he's not. Yeah. Those poems, if you keep out, they'll hit you like, like, boing, you know, you'll have the light bubble come on. You go, oh, you know, you thought you understood it and now all of a sudden you understand this other layer that's just subtly there, but it's definitely there. Yeah. And that'll give you shivers. You don't have shivers growing up your spine. Yeah. I remember taking a class in grad school on Frost. And I remember, and I was kind of resistant to it. I was like, I don't want to, like, Frost is old news. I don't want to get class on Frost, but I took it. And I remember my mind being kind of blown by, um, it's not called the roadless travel world, right? What's up? The most famous poem we said the roadless travel. Is that what the title of it? I think it is. But that it actually, he was saying, like, it doesn't matter which way you go. It's all the same.

1:07:31Well, it's very ambiguous. It's so, everybody who reads that interprets it in a way that useful to them. Oh, he's talking about taking the last travel road. Oh, he's talking about it, taking the more travel road. Oh, he's, you know, it doesn't matter at all, which one you take. For the poem, you know, the one that's so famous where it's, uh, miles to go before I sleep. Oh, yeah. Miles to go before I sleep at the end of the poem. He repeats the line. Yeah. And he's looking at the snowy, these wood, these deep woods with snow in them. And he's, he's, he's mesmerized by it. But he says, I can't stop. I can't, I, I got to keep moving because I, there's miles to go before I sleep. And, and people, I mean, if the interpret at that point and so many ways, it's just there's just enough ambiguity. The artist has to have, I think, just the right amount of ambiguity, but so that it's not, um, obvious. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

1:08:31Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh, this is now partially mine because I have my interpretation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Um, okay. So the other quote I wanted to read is from Martin Amos, who passed away in 2023. He was an English novelist and essayist, memoirist, screenwriter, critic, um, best known for his novels, Money and London Fields. Have you read them? Do you know them? I have not. I have read one or two of his novels. Lucky Jim, I think. Mm-hmm. Was one of them. Okay. Uh-huh. That by red and graduate school. So I have, but it's been a hundred years since I read anything of his. Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. Well, he said, Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel.

1:09:31If he can drive, distrust the poems. And I was like, I have to share this with Jim. I have to hear what he thinks. Well, I love that kind of thing. I know. I love that kind of thing. I'm a pretty good driver. You are. Um, better in my old age than I was when I was young. That was a bit wild as a driver when I was young. Um, that's so interesting. That's an interesting thing. I, I think I know what he means. Yeah. Because the poet is going to be distracted by things that he's seeing or she's seeing, you know, out the window. Oh, God, look at that tree. You know, you know, the poet is kind of, it's, it doesn't want to stay focused on the white line ahead of him. He wants to be aware of as much as he can. Uh-huh. So I have a practice when I'm driving.

1:10:34It's, it's silly, but I do this. When I come to a red light or a stop sign, rather than they'd be bored or, you know, get it going to be, you know, kicking my leg because I'm, it's anxious to get on. I will just stop and look at everything I can see. I'll just look at everything around and then the light turns red and I go on and I'll do it the next time. So that I'm not doing it while I'm, you don't get people honking at you when the light turns green. Go, go, go. Uh, well, I look back at the light. I keep it, I keep back at the light, but I hit that. Yeah, they have home for me a few times. But I realized that there's stuff around me that it's kind of interesting, but I've not seen it. I go by this thing every day and I've never seen it before. And there it is. Oh my God, look at that. You know, just, just trying to, I'll do other practices. I think are poet, you know, poet energy kind of stuff.

1:11:37I learned, I read about this somewhere many, many years ago. I think it was in the Carlos customator work. Many years ago, where the, the old shaman would have his, his mentee, his, what, what's the word? His, whatever the right word is. He would have him walking and a princess, thank you. He would have, he would have the apprentice walking. And he would say, now, don't look at the tree. Look at the edge of the tree. You know, make your eyes concentrate on what's going on at that boundary, at the edge between the tree and everything that's beyond it. So I'll do things like that. Here's one of the weird things that I've, I'd say, I've described, I never read this.

1:12:37I just started noticing this. I guess it was customator to call my attention to this is that my eyes go habitually where they go. They go habitually where they go. So if like right now instead of look my, my eyes habitually go to your eyes. But if I look, if I look, but past you, now I see that plant, you know, it's in a little white, almost like a coffee cup. You know, I see that work of art there. I start noticing things around or the weave in the shadow of the plant behind you. You know, and I start, you know, this, it's just not just always break your habits of where you're looking. Yeah. And look, it's something you'll realize, oh, I've owned this object. I've been living there for decades and I've never seen that about it because my eye, it's not in my eye routine.

1:13:40My eye routine is moving. Yeah, it's so, it's really interesting to do this. Yeah. I don't think it'll drive you crazy. It depends how much you do it, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I suppose that's true. It might drive the people around you crazy. I'm trying to do it in the, no circumstance, although I serve, ticiously do it some. Yeah. Because it's just interesting to notice, realize there's something going on right in front of me that it's not anything big, but it's just interesting to notice it. And for the eye to relax out of its routine a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, I, was it you who had a class? Maybe it was Laura Gray Street, our mutual friend, the art of noticing. I remember taking a class with that name and that sounds like what you're saying. Like it's just the, the practice of noticing, the art of noticing. Yeah, I think it's a really worthy practice. Yeah. Just, and it's, it is fun because you will discover things that you would not have seen and

1:14:46they are interesting, especially if you're an artist or a writer. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm just looking at the blue painting behind you. I'm pretty in my cursor over there, right there. It looks like it's looking up through perhaps a canopy of trees. I don't know, my eyes aren't that great. And, you know, I'm looking at this as a zoom. But it's, the artist was in order to draw that, the artists had to see more than what, a normal, you know, someone just walking under that would say they have to or they can't do it. And that's the art of bringing it back to life in a different form is to do that. I don't know if that makes any sense or not. It does. Yeah. I'm the artist of that one. Oh, are you? I'm a fan of type. So it's like flowers that we plucked from our yard and made a cyanotype with the sun. Oh, cool.

1:15:46Yeah. So it's like, yeah, a whole different process than you realize just by looking at it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I have one more quote for you if you're up for it. Oh, sure. Okay. And this kind of circles back to things we were saying earlier, I think. So I think it's, it's going to be interesting to look at. But it's Freddie Mercury, the rock band queen. And he said, people are always asking me what my lyrics mean. Well I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyze his work. If you see it darling, then it's there. Yeah. Well, he's got some pretty wild lyrics in some of his songs. And I've seen, I actually was teaching out in the University of Nebraska Omaha MFA program out there. And one of the other faculty members did a whole lecture on what's the sort of operatic

1:16:50one. Bohemian Rhapsody. Bohemian did a whole exegesis of Bohemian Rhapsody. And it was, I mean, she was interpreting. And yeah, that thing can be seen a lot of different ways. And but she was also paying attention to the music. But just the words and the sort of transitions that it makes. Right to transitions musically too, to kind of follow the transitions of some, sometimes into a new section of words, but also into perhaps maybe a new cadence where sometimes the music slows down and maybe the same words. But now they're being rendered differently and so on. Anyway, it was, it was interesting and fun.

1:17:51And yeah, I think Freddie is, is, is on the mark with that. Yeah. There are some really fine songwriters out there writing songs that have every bit the psychological and emotional subtlety that good points have. You have to look, some of them are not like that and they're still fun. But you know, there's some songs, Dylan is famous for this. But there are plenty of others that are doing it also. Yeah. I love that about songwriting that it can go that way. But there's a real art and craft to it. Which I have not mastered. Yeah. I know you and I have spent a lot of time watching videos of songs too and getting that. Emmy Lou Harris is someone I love because you introduced me to her and I feel like she does that. She's written some beautiful songs, but she of course covers a lot of songs too.

1:18:53But no, yeah, no, she's terrific. Yeah. Johnny Mitchell. Oh my God. Johnny Mitchell is a true genius. And she's constantly changing. She's not making a lot of music anymore. She has some sort of illness to sort of make it difficult for her. She's still around. But that set her back for quite a bit. I don't know. I think she's still painting. She's a visual artist and a and a musician. I think she probably prefers the visual art, but we know her mostly as it. Yeah. I don't know if I know her visual art at all. She was writing songs as a teenager that are more sophisticated, more interesting and beautiful and amazing than people that have been doing it for 30 or 40 years. She just is a brilliant artist. One of my favorites.

1:19:53She's really one of my favorites. Yeah. No, she's me. We got a record player recently because we're good millennials and we need a record player. And we got blue and it's been a favorite for us to put on. Yeah. Another very famous, I love blue. It's one of my favorites too. What is it called? Spark and oh shoot. I hate one. I can't. There's two words. What usually goes with spark? Spark and something in spark. Anyway. I don't know. But it has an end. Spark and something. I can't remember. But that's it. Court and spark. Court and spark. That's an astonishing album. I mean, it's a great, great album. It has to be that in blue too, I think. Among the, I think the greatest albums of anybody.

1:20:55They're anybody. Period. Yeah. I don't know that one as well. I'll have to grab that one. Yeah. I would recommend that one. And I love all those early ones too, where it's a little more folky. But I love them, though. I think they're magnificent. And then she becomes more and more subtly jazzy as she works through. And you can feel her getting more, what's the right word, more sophisticated in her music. And also the lyrics start falling out of those. At first she was writing ballads, literary ballads. And then later, they're much more open, open space kind of lyrics. Very interesting artist to follow. Yeah. Oh, okay. I feel like we could talk about music for a while. Okay. Let's start to wrap up, Jim. If the listeners were to leave this conversation with your definition of the word poetry.

1:21:57You're going to put me on a hot sheet. Oh, yes. And the hot sheet. Yes. What would that definition be? Or what would you want them to take? I would say that poetry is a love for life as it is. Not wishing it was something else different. And a love for its complexity. It's violence. It's the calm wherever that is. The beauty, the ugliness. A true love and fascination with how life unfolds.

1:22:58As it does, just as it is. I think that for me might be what I would say. Do you think it can do that and still bring about change? The cool thing about that to me is that that is change. So everything is changing constantly. There's not a single thing. We can talk about spirit. We can talk about something outside of the manifested world. But everything in the manifesting world is changing constantly every second. Everything about your body, everything in your mind is moving. It's really energy moving. Even though it's maybe moving at a different wavelength than a piece of music or something else or a butterfly. But it's all moving.

1:24:00Even the air, the molecules and the air, everything is moving and changing constantly. Whether you try to change it or you don't. And if you try to change it, that's okay. Because that's just changing, more changing than it would have been changing anyway. God has changed as Octavia Butler says. Oh, does he? I'm okay. Yeah, she's the Octavia Butler, the science fiction writer. Okay. Yeah, God has changed. You would love those. In my Christ books. I have it. I'll send you copies. Okay. I mean, if you're willing to do that. Octavia, what's your last name? Butler. Butler, okay. Yeah, I think you'd like those books a lot. What's your definition? Oh. Oh, goodness. That's hard. I don't know if I like that. My definition of poetry. Well, I mean, part of my thesis for this whole podcast is that everything is poetry, even marketing copy, even...

1:25:03Yeah, any kind of movement, even the tasks that I go about my day doing, even the ones I don't like, like doing the dishes or changing the sheets like I did earlier this morning. So yeah, I think my definition of poetry would have to involve... Oh, yeah. Hmm. The word that keeps coming up in my mind is intention that there's like... If we go back to the root of the making, right, of the like taking and making and the intention in the making and like... I think being an intentional, like good loving maker of a thing, whatever that thing is, but like doing it with intention and care and like good tending, right?

1:26:06There's the connection to between the word attention and tend and like being a maker who tends. That is my definition of I guess poet, right, the maker who tends and pays attention. Hmm. I like that. That's nice. That's really nice, yeah. Thank you. I wasn't sure I was going to get there, but that's self. But like a good, a good way to see how... That was a poem, you see. It came spontaneously. You hadn't thought it before. You started looking, your eyes went up and you started bringing it. You started being open to something. You know, in a sense you weren't praying, but in a sense you were praying something come to me, please. You know, and something comes and then it gets translated into words. It's not interesting. That is interesting. You really can't feel it if you stop and just pay attention to what's happening. You can feel that kind of immediacy of what's happening.

1:27:09Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for asking that. That was a good experience. Oh, Jim, this has been so lovely. Like I said at the beginning, this has been such an important episode to me, to have you on, to as like, as I was saying to you before we hit record, like probably the number one person I would think of when I think who is a mentor, who has been a mentor to me. So it means a lot that you're here. Does people want to find your poetry or read your work or learn more about you, where on the internet should we send them? Oh, well, you can always go to Amazon, I guess. Various publishers, I would like people to know about Reddit and press. They've published like five of my books and all small presses right now, independent literary presses are struggling because the government is pulling out funding. And so they're all asking people to support them, to keep them going.

1:28:14And these independent publishers are, they're independent in the same way that an independent journalist is. They're not, they're doing what feels right to them. And they are in some ways looking at culture and looking at government and objective ways, which is important and which is being stamped out, to be honest. Anyway, red hand press is struggling. Send them money. You can just go to their website. You can find it just Google red hand press. Some of them are still there, some of them are out of print now. There's another small press, press 53, who they've done two of my books. And the last one, this towheaded stone thrower, they did, which is an important book for me. And because it's just so personal, the most personal book I've written by far. And they can find that.

1:29:15I would say buy it from, you can get it on Amazon, but directly from the publisher, if you can, because that goes to their financial well-being. And there are other presses. There's a press out in California, Gunpowder Press. Oh yeah. Published one of my books. And that's a relatively young press, but they are very fine. They do very beautiful work. Their books are beautiful. So you can, again, you can just Google Gunpowder Press. They're out in Pasadena, I think. And doing really, really cool things. So those are some places. And Amazon is just sort of a catch-all. Most everything will be there somewhere. Well, we will add links to the presses in the show notes of the episode. We will not add a link to Amazon. No way to go. If they need that, they can find that. They can find that on their own.

1:30:16Yeah. And yeah, so we'll link to the presses and to your books directly. So thank you, Jim. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, listen, thank you for asking me to do it. I had a lot of fun doing it. And yeah, it's just fun to think about these things, isn't it? And talk about kind of explore. Yeah. Yeah, that's very fun. I agree. OK, I'll stop recording. Let me add a little bit of a stop. Oh, there you go. Thank you so much for listening to It's All Poetry. It means the world to have you here. You can find all the resources and links from this episode in the show notes. The music that you hear throughout is by Jack Pierce. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review wherever you listen so that we can spread the love of language and etymology far and wide. There's also a bunch of other stuff that you might want to check out from my weekly newsletter with marketing prompts to one-on-one copy coaching for your business,

1:31:19some copy courses, and a few other things that I'm not even aware of at the time of recording because I add stuff all the time. But everything is right there at copypoetics.com. Thank you again for loving words with me. I'll see you next time.