Competition Really Isn’t

     Dick was reading Scott Symons obituary to me this morning while my hands were plunged deep into peanut butter cookie dough. I had just finished resupplying the misplaced lyrics to a granny song online, to which new lyrics had been written, trying to smooth over the old & the new, both coming from vigorous voices.

     And I felt I suddenly understood why the competitveness goes on among poets especially, (though it goes on in all creative areas). It is because of the mystical something that falls down around your shoulders like a warm mantle on a cold night. It feels as though you’ve been gifted with the words, outside all you’ve done to create them.

      So they’ve been passed on from that somewhere to you and it is your sworn duty to pass them on to all and sundry now. Like an Olympus relay.

      So you pipe up, support, propagate, defend and spread them around like Johnny Appleseed with a new site for an orchard. Which is fine when you’re just a single gawky, coonhat-wearing fruitpusher, but when there are hundreds, thousands, millions of you, many, many dead and all still touting the words with which you’ve been gifted, believing that they must push, all with entirely different visions, all equally weighty in your eyes, then the cacaphony is multitudinous but justifiable. The stuff is in you and cannot be ignored.

     Sure, there’s also the great desire to be noted, crowned and enthroned but it goes beyond that to a real feeling of mission. “These are the words I got. Hear them. Give them a hearing. Listen.’  Someone said, the other day, that ‘meetings’ are now being referred to as ‘listenings.’ Right now, to me, that’s fresh and I like it and I’ve been passing it on.

     This insight about being gifted with ‘words,’ of which I speak, has helped me undestand a little better the poets standing on top of the poets in an infinite pyramid to be heard. It’s a natural process, like a clear stream down a mountain, gathering force. That voice is in every single thing in nature. Science has proved that even the rocks speak. Probably with exactly the same message as the poet has. So the pile is large but at least the impulse goes beyond self aggrandizement to something wonderful. And we are all in the chorus line.