I don’t like the word ‘poetry,’ and I don’t like poetry readings, and I usually don’t like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I’m kind of a curator, and I’m kind of a night-owl reporter.
—Tom Waits
Poetry is a very dangerous word.
It's very misused.
Most people, when they hear the word 'poetry,' think of being chained to a school desk memorizing 'Ode on a Grecian Urn!
When somebody says that they're going to read me a poem, I can think of any of a number of things that I'd rather be doing.
I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet—so I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure, or an inebriational travelogue, and all of a sudden it takes on a whole new form and meaning.
If I'm tied down and have to call myself something. I prefer 'storyteller! Everybody has their own definition of what poetry is, and of who's a poet. I think that Charles Bukowski is a poet—and I think that most will agree to that.
The creative process is imagination, memories, nightmares, and dismantling certain aspects of this world and putting them back together in the dark.
Songs aren’t necessarily verbatim chronicles or necessarily journal entries, they’re like smoke, it’s like it’s made out of smoke.
I really wasn’t part of a scene. I didn’t want to be part of a scene. I wanted to take it all in—and then kind of, y’know, set it all on fire and see what remained.
I didn’t really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y’know? And a world I could call my own.
Were you consciously cultivating a persona back then? Were you thinking about wanting to be a certain kind of writer and trying to live the way a guy like that would live?
Well, all writers are looking for that, y’know?
Where do you have to go to find the real shit?
But it still requires a great deal of craft and the correct sensibility and style and… Yeah. I probably should have changed my name. It would have been a lot simpler for me. Because you’re trying to find out what it is about you that’s genuine, and what you have to invent.
Most people don’t care if you’re telling them the truth or if you’re telling them a lie, as long as they’re entertained by it. You find that out really fast. You could tell somebody that you used to work in the circus, or you worked at a slaughterhouse, or you drove an ice cream truck, or you worked at the racetrack.
It doesn’t much matter to anybody.
Everyone’s selling their story. Made-up or true, it doesn’t matter. It’s a place of commerce as well, so everyone’s trying to make it, y’know?
I’ve always loved songs of adventure. Murder ballads, songs about shipwrecks and terrible acts of depravity and heroism. Erotic tales of seductions. Songs of romance, wild courage and mystery.
Everyone has tried at one time or another to live inside a song. Songs where people died for love, songs of people on the run, songs of ghost ships or bank robberies. I’ve always wanted to live inside songs and never come back.
The paywall was removed from my essay over the weekend. I hope you can check it out. Thank you all for being here and reading this Substack.