poetry – Mad King Thomas

It is okay to be goofy, it is okay to be funny. Tears are good but they are always archival, they pull us back and down, they mourn, they seek to repeat, but laughter throws us forward, levity raises us, the body opens. Laughter is always unruly. The goofy is the body’s blooming in the mind. Let us laugh so hard we disrupt the tragedy! It’s hard to think when we laugh and that is one reason, once it was invented, we could not live without it. It is a way of sleeping while feeling intensely awake. The body is jostling itself into rejuvenation. …
We laugh not only at the fantastical but also at the truth that is shown to us out of place, devoid of decorum, in disjuncture from our expectations of ettiquette, of consistency. To laugh always takes us to the site of rupture, it may be how our body is attempting to educate our consciousness of the moment of its death. Laughter is always brief in its triumph over pain, but in its intensity it suggests too that pain is brief.
-Dean Young, the Art of Recklessness

I’ve been devouring this book. It’s a book about poetry that seems to get this chaotic, violent, benevolent thing called a body and how it and the mind get together and make birds. All I ever want to do is post every second or third sentence, just say, “Look! There it is! He’s got it! That’s how it works!” It feels like he’s seen into my brain and composed this book as encouragement, inspiration, critique and explanation. To being more recklessness. To finding broken things. To making. To dancing freakingout poems.

We want extravagance. We want 80 pairs of shoes and dead fish and Astroturf. We want to waste less. We want 400 people. We want to be paid. We want to save the world. We want the world to be worth saving. We want to speak with our bodies. We want to sing a song our voices won’t reach. We want mystery. We want to make the best dance that was ever made. We want to drink without being hungover. We want to save all dances from obscurity. We want people to laugh and we want them not to laugh. We want rhinestone body suits and ostrich feathers. We want to destroy capitalism. We want to dance to music. We want longer hamstrings. We want to resist temptation. We want to be disgusting. We want to get a date after the show. We want a parcel of wild land. We want to want less. We want a green Bible. We want to be loved. We want lipstick. We want snacks. We want clarity. We want to be naked in the rain. We want to be better people. We want to know why. We want to be virtuosic. We want tree frogs and glitter. We want to visit everyone. We want good weather.

(This statement created and disseminated without approval by anyone. Intentional obfuscation caused by unrelenting use of the plural first person.)

Tag: poetry

…it suggests too that pain is brief.

The real problem with making dance