POETRY TOC     HIGHWAYS TOC     HEY

Evolution

Here I am again, underwater. I was very much influenced by heiku, and wrote some poems in strict heiku form (in English, of course). That was in high school mostly, I think, like my Roman poems. The discipline of heiku, together with my inner jazz, and with my way of doing a poetic sketch, let's say, made me create some short, emotional bursts recorded like a seismograph. A poem is like a story (a joke at its low end, a novel at the long)always obeying the fundamental law of hello, how are you? We propose a riddle, and the listener is attentive, and we deliver a punch line. There are a thousand ways of not saying this very well, but basically it amounts to this. You draw the reader in, like that predator fish at the bottom of a sea of dreams, and then you lay the snap on them. Which pleases them, because it rewards their energy and attention. I see myself going back to that dreamscape in the sea, maybe because we evolved from that mulmy abyss. Although I think that's probably hyperbole because I think our real genesis was in the shallow, sunny tidal zone where we rocked in the waves, warmed by the sun; phototropic; and eventually decided to escape to the slightly safer environment of land, where predators generally could not take you out in three dimensions but on a mostly Flatworld sort of game board (level ground, rippling hills, etc). On land, also, you have two periods each day of alternating light and dark, whereas I imagine in some coastal sea close to shore, you would have four such alternates, or double days so to speak, with the movement of tides. It's probably simplistic but I imagine the earth, dancing with the moon, and between them there are two high and two low tides a day in many places. So it's high-low, high-low, or dark-light, dark-light, or night-day, night-day for a little creature half buried in sand in the tide line. At least, in poetry. I was a freshman at university now, and the long-range hitch hiking began.

Sees Itself