I have decided to do more writing... about "writing", meaning poetry; or "The Poetry" as I megalomaniacally exclaim it, for it is an art form that stands on its own; it is not the lyrics that accompany a hit song, like shabby groupies waiting for the Music and The Musician.
The poetry is "a doing" or "something a-doing".
Nowadays we prefer to use the Passive Voice, and say "something being done" or "something that was done", but I think we should reject those hyper-logical forms for the old Passival, and say like Jonson that "something is a-doing" or like Austen that "something is doing".
To our way of thinking, this leaves an ambiguity between the active and the passive, but if you try it, you'll see the ambiguity soon disappear.
That is a good thing for the poetry, for it does away with the idea that a poem is a static and unmoving thing.
What good is Homer if no one re-interprets it? What good Shakespeare? What good Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied?
The words may not change, but the voice does, the emphasis mutates, the ambience evolves, the emotions may be changed. The words remain the Polar Star about which the constellations of voice, feeling, and imagery revolve.
As the poetry is "a doing", it is the most ancient of the creations of man: no other behavior is named The Doing.
The poetry is swimming in life's ocean as the billions of facets of the reflecting surfaces of the water choreograph a simulacrum of eternity; it is an odyssey with one's companions upon a vessel of our own making.
The non-poetic is being moored at the dock... or I should say "mooring at the dock"...
Be verbs! Be action words and phrases! Even in our sleep and dreams, be the ongoing and the everdoing, for we live in a time of suffocation. Run and breathe.
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