Wise is the plural of Why

The way of understanding is questioning, as any three-year-old intuitively knows.

no matter the speed or pattern of habit of your writing, when you can write anything, and you can, how do you decide which is worth pursuing?

what is too pat or easy? what nags as wrong or unresolved? what all can you disassemble? what feels right?

that subjective line of choices (rather than fate or bodychecking muse) suggests things have no inherent hierarchy of value, or anchor, no implicit profundity, weight or significance except what you attach. whose worldview are we backing?

within a chaotic universe, do we add chaos or comfort with a tiny subset of order? what do ethics and honesty in poetry look like? will our poems have painful earnestness or sense of play and humour? do we decorate or strip their bell-holders bare? why? to gain what?

which horizon do we push towards? what do you play up or downplay? what do you take for granted vs take as unscalable cliffs of granite? behind each of these questions is why. does your decision come out of who or where you are? or who or where you will be?

to write a poem to perform what others consider might entertain. it can embrace jokey-hokey to transcribe your best received shtick for good of perpetuity. that’s a holding pattern. a social grease. it is a handshake. that serves a use.

some poets are cheerful socially and grim in poems. some are withdrawn or polite socially and riotous on the page. Or any other binary complement you may think of. why the opposition? why not every aspect of self funnelled to poem as poem-worthy?

choice of words comes down to a matter of values and what you want to make more of. what you want to live inside yourself and to spread. whatever you dwell on you will feel more strongly about. maybe a poem is a quick impulsive jot, maybe an obsessive whirlpool. shall we be moderate in all things except poetry?

what matters is what you give energy to. energy causes the the matter. probably physics can back that up with an equation. (any pataphysician of poetry can confirm?). attention begets attention begets sense of importance and confirmation bias. whatever matters most depends on what you let yourself be preoccupied with and put importance on. you therefore can pivot significance with your attention but muff it with the observer effect of consciously watching. you can’t sustainable watch yourself watching all the time but you can visit and interrogate your intentions instead of floating unquestioningly on the magic carpet of the muse.

do you value, or honour, resolution, ambiguity, grief, lesson, details, sound, long history, or story? the act of recording and fixing or synthesis? or the sensation of revel of blurt? eulogizing or imagining what could be?

to write is to explore topography of semantics and possibilities. Chen Chen wrote on January 10th,

>“better, i think, when i work on a poem, to believe i have something to learn”

when I was younger, to write was to vent the explosive build up of being crushed, but as i age, i react less, aim to solidify my footing and initiate action, and curiosity. I have more luxury of choice, what do i want to build rather than be forced to live inside?

the use of writing is time set aside for the act of paying attention, rolling something around in the head, a sustained examining to see in the round, to reconsider first takes. it is building muscles of reflection and insight. it is shucking off exterior forces to listen for quiet inner guide.

to really do the work, the inner work, is to write against my own walls, to question my own assumptions, to lock-pick to reveal my secret heart, in privacy and trust within myself and let fallout and implications come. who will i become?

to publish is to later set free that exploration which may do something for someone else at a comparable point on their path or a curiosity.