On Writing #93 : lars palm

first things first

lars palm

writing, to me, is first & foremost fun. all else is beside the point. more or less, anyway. except maybe that it allows me to travel regularly to read

that done

my aim is 2 poems a day. a habit i picked up from an interview with Hugo Claus who said he did 2 pages every day to keep the boring necessities at bay, or words to that effect. they need not even be functional, although usually one of them is. & frankly i write where & when i can. with morning coffee, to wake my head. breaks during bread work. on the road. in a cafe or pub.

very rarely in splendid isolation. or silence. what's there to get those words dancing?

& that dance is important. not so much on the page as in your head

& how to do that? beats me

now that's no kind of answer. so. we take another angle. or angel

there is of course the mechanical side to it. pen & paper. always. staring into a empty word document wipes me blank. then choosing what to type into that word document. choosing what  goes into one of the manuscripts & which one of them. as in selection process

or in the words of Eileen Tabios; ”poetry as a way of life” as opposed to lifestyle which you may change as you wish. & which you choose. or is it silly of me saying poetry chose me. when after all it comes down to me still not having the patience to write any kind of longer prose. not that i crave doing that for now

& as with so many other poets most anything can fit into one poem or other. Phil Whalen's ”graph of the mind moving” comes to mind. & maybe that brings us back to those dancing words. those words entering the reader's head causing tiny earthquakes leaving the landscape looking slightly different than before. or not. most of the time we may not know

& still we persist. why? why not?

tell me why i shouldn't. i'll be sure not to listen

lars palm [photo credit: Petra Palm] lives with his lovely wife & official photographer currently in Malmö where he writes, teaches, translates, edits among other such activities. his most recent (chap)books are all hat, no cattle (gradient books, 2015), & nobody in between (the red ceilings press, 2015) & look who's singing (moria, 2015). as for the future, there's a little thing, 4 long, forthcoming from the Knives Forks and Spoons Press. he's also recently written one-off poems for things like an animation film festival, an empty bullet casing, a lamp & an anarchist bar in Berlin