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Printed with permission.
Mike Amado is a self-employed musician and performance poet from Plymouth. In addition to hosting poetry events throughout the Boston area, he has recently started a monthly poetry event in Plymouth with a feature poet each month followed by open mic.
This work seems to keep it all in perspective. *smile*
The Punk Poet and the Editor
My editor's office is in a professional building,
with dentists, doctors, and plastic surgeons who
think they're doctors!
His tool of choice is a red Sharpie -- more like
a scalpel or meat cleaver. His fingertips are
always red with its ink. . .
I guess he hadn't thought to utilize sterile gloves
with all that "writing" he does.
And, every time I leave there, my manuscripts
are ten pounds lighter -- more streamlined and bare,
leaving bone behind.
He should change his professional name to
"Wordwatchers". . .Give us a week, we'll take away
the weight of those weighty words clogging the
arteries of your flabby poetry!
But maybe he can see the beach glass amid the
sand and weeds. . .so I asked him with an obvious
stage presence, "Can you finally see in my poems
the church wall from the scaffold?"
He paused to look up, but with the red pen still scratching, and his
eyebrow cocked, he asked, "What does church reconstruction
have to do with poetry? At least he had seen a parallel
in my analogy. You have to dig beneath
the surface to extract other layers of meaning like
an onion after an autopsy. But he takes every sentence
and leaves it dismembered, performing semantic
dissection on parts of my speech, then transecting
the skin of preposition from the noun-flesh
in such a way to confirm the fact that "Poetry. . .
is the art of condensing."
Exposing to view through a part-by-part analysis of
the physiology of signs and symbols; concepts and
feelings to reveal not just the actual structure
but the anatomy of "minimalism."
Sometimes I have to stick up for my
children under his pen and say, "I want to
leave that part the way it is." But he says,
"That's not what the readers need to hear."
And I get it, it's like what Ahmed, the plastic
surgeon down the hall says when he's vacuuming out
some guy's love-handles: "These are not what
the people need to see!"
Hey, Mr. Editor, dude, "Oh, Captain, my Captain". . .
shouldn't a poem, or the milk carton-like
final product of which, be less of a film on the
cutting room floor, and even less of a skeletal
supermodel, and more like a model of creativity?
Because, right now as we speak, I hear voices
speaking in colors, rather than words,
transcribing with lightning flashes rather than
letters (and they say they don't like you very much),
and as they ruminate, poems cohere infinite
and I hear them; I hear them!
"You need help," he said.
"And my help, too. Your voice is 'cut-and-paste,'
a punk poet with 'no-school' ambition and
a complicated attitude, stubborn." He raged:
"Your chance is slim -- a thin sliver of reckoning -- that
the slight bit of esteem you narrowly missed will
be the girth of your body of work."
"Hmmmm. . ." I thought. "I love you, too!" That's right:
You cut and I paste, but 'cut-and-paste' I'm not --
only a puzzle. And a punk and a complicated
attitude to instigate the muses to toss me over
their forty-ounces of inspiration so I can
christen it through the wall of inarticulation and
let the pieces fall like seeds, dive-bombing.
That's why my fingertips are black with ink,
and yours are blood red."
"Try editing that one, big guy."
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Keeping it in perspective - Mike Amado - Read last post (Read 56 times)
