Sometimes I'll have a thought or an imaginary wandering for a moment that gives me a point of view that used to not be mine. I'll smell, for a short second, how someone else approaches the world, and it has an eerie deja-vu quality. Once I felt as a mother screaming at her child out of fear. Another time I thought like a man who couldn't climb stairs without hurting. At still another, I looked at a beer as a constant escape yet downfall.
The last outlook-change came just a while ago as I was wandering off while staring at Facebook and listening to Diane Rehm show. As I let go a bit I imagined -- no, felt is perhaps a better way to put it -- how someone I know could fundamentally approach poetry as a collective, social endeavor. I don't mean in the sense of collaborating on poems, but how it feels to be a participant from the ground of one's art up. How to say it: it's as if one approaches the page as a kind of blog -- meant from the outset for social consumption and for participation in the readers of poetry.
I've always had such a silly purist individualist approach to writing poems, but now I've caught the whiff, as if in dream light, of the feelings that go with approaching poems from a largely socially-considered position. And now that I've put this smell-netting into such intellectual terms, I wonder if its impact is, like deja-vu, already a lesser thing, lesser thing, than it once was.
