[MD] Fwd: ACLA 2016: "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[Ron]
ORPHEUS with his lute made trees 
And the mountain tops that freeze 
   Bow themselves when he did sing:

[Arlo]
Hi Ron, good to hear from you. Someone once told me that words are musical notes, and we either create cacophony or euphony (I tend to use 'symphony' now when I share the analogy, as it better underscores the shared voices of our being). Poetry in this way of thinking is the art of tuning one's words towards euphony, sculpting away the excess and leaving the beautiful. When our words flow, note after note, we mirror in language the skill of the welder in ZMM.

"He sparks the torch, and sets a tiny little blue flame and then, it's hard to describe, actually dances the torch and the rod in separate little rhythms over the thin sheet metal, the whole spot a uniform luminous orange-yellow, dropping the torch and filler rod down at the exact right moment and then removing them. No holes. You can hardly see the weld. "That's beautiful," I say."

So, to me, in the end, poetry is simply a way of being artful, and caring in our expressions. And the more we practice that, the more it becomes habit, the more it spreads into other practices. Whether we are putting paint onto a canvas, musical scoring onto paper, or words into an utterance.