Poetry.. again

Starting to wake up to reading poetry again. Hard to describe what it's like to have let this attenuation slip over months and months and then rekindle it. Was starting to look at all these mutants, poets/friends of mine, and their constant engagement with this activity as arcane and a little disturbed.

Hard to say what it is about blue collar life that wants to make poetry so foreign. Was listening to Philip Levine interviewed on NPR's 'Marketplace' (you can just guess at the level of depth in this 2-minute conversation) and he mentioned exhaustion as the thing keeping the physical toiler from writing. Not sure that's it. I want to say that in labor, language has to stay a transparent medium and cannot become an opaque object, in the way language perhaps is in/for poetry. But this forgets the constant interrogation of language brought on by multiple-language conversations: I work with one native German-speaker, one native Italian-speaker, many, many native Spanish speakers (actually, most days I'm nowhere near a single native English-speaker, which didn't occur to me until just now). And in this country, labor has always looked like this, and will continue to. A poem showing the constant transactions of language trying to get at social goals, like erecting a wall or establishing who is joto or not, would be worth reading. That poem is better written by someone else, maybe Edwin Torres or Harriet Mullen or Mark Nowak. Maybe I could find a grant to have any of those three work on my crew for a week or a month and create this transaction on paper.

I still would have no idea what it is I'm trying to write right now. I think maybe it's going to be about Soul singers, though.