Chuck Perrin

I found a page in my journal this morning that roughed me up, shoving me once again up against that hard wall of self realization.

I had watched the Allen Ginsberg movie “Howl” with James Franco streaming Ginsberg, the mannerisms, speech patterns, the gestures . . . but it was the words, Allen’s words, coming out of his mouth which slapped me . . . I found myself scribbling them down as fast as they came off the screen . . . something like . . .

“Poetry is a rhythmic articulation of feeling. That feeling is an impulse that begins inside and rises up out of the mouth and ears, coming forth as a croon, or a groan, or a sigh . . . so you try to put words to that by looking around you . . . you simply articulate what you’re feeling. In the moment of composition, I don’t necessarily know what it means, it comes to mean something later . . . and after a year or two, it comes to mean something clear . . . unconsciously . . . which takes on meaning in time, like photographs developing slowly. If it’s at all spontaneous, I don’t even know if it makes sense sometimes. And at other times, it makes complete sense and I start crying because I realize I’m hitting an area that’s absolutely true . . . able to be read by someone centuries later and perhaps wept to. It is, in that sense, prophecy, because it touches a common key . . . knowing and feeling something that someone will know and feel in 100 years.”

At the top of this same page, I had also written a self description by the artist America Martin: “The artist is gluttonous, constantly devouring life in order to translate all she sees, smells, lives, or breathes into her own language . . . why and for what? For the blistering personal joy that comes when one is doing something of and about truth. . . “

Truth – am I really man enough to hang with it?