Poetry.
I've always said that playing with poetry is very dear to me and I think that it's because it's been my favourite place to go and learn.
I still don't understand poetry. I have this feeling that most poets don't understand it either, though.
I think that, like me, they write something and strip it down a bit (I tend to do poetic edits in my mind and strip it down before it hits the page) and convey a little brain image with a footnote of emotion scrawled beneath it by hand. Like an old photo with a date and location.
But....there's just so much room to play in the realm of poetry once you get past the schoolyard and into the forest. Finding a tree where Al Purdy leaned against to take a shit, or a puddle of puke that even the crows won't touch because Bukowski spilled it there...but it's there, and it's a deerpath art gallery of people who wandered from the manicured grounds of the craft.
And I'm seeing these things because I'm on that path. Looking for that babbling brook to sit beside and smoke. My own place within these woods.
Cohen's voice humbly wakes me upon the trail and I twist and turn and spy spots where others have made camp....yet to find where e.e. cummings built a fire.
But there's definitely a sense that it's a rather abandoned forest. An archaeological dig, while a twenty-story tower has patio views of my random wanders beneath treetops, writing snickerpoems in their heads about being where the words really live now.
But then, under a leaf...there's a smoke-butt that I'm pretty sure was Ginsberg's...so I keep going.
 
- Jaimen Shires