I need to work on my empathy

1.

Last Christmas my dad stopped me when I was outside, warming up my car, and he stressed that I must "work on my empathy." My relationship with my sister had started to break down and I barely talked to her this past Christmas; I never talk to her now. I'm not sure how to do it either.

I also treated a woman here in Stillwater very poorly and I rarely see her around now. My friend asked me if I have ever been hurt, we were drunk, and I said "fuck yeah, I've been hurt," or something like that. Probably not as funny or visceral. Probably, I just said "yeah."

2.

I kept thinking I've been writing poems from this "character" named Tommy but they all sound the same. I need to ditch the artifice and realize this is just my fucking voice. Every poem I have written since I moved down here has been me and only me. With the exception of a few early ones (I've tried to bring in this feminine voice, but she sounds like me too, or my sister). I don't know what I am doing sometimes.


3.

I tend to get pegged as a "funny guy." This is fine sometimes but most of the time I wish it wasn't, and I know it's partly my fault. Boisseau used to recommend Old Male Poets to me she thought I'd like him. I kind of did, well, I liked half a book, but I finally came to the realization his work lacks ghosts.

Boisseau kind of pointed to this and so did Hadara: poems contain ghosts, or ghost words of the Real Poem you're trying to write. There has been this intangible aspect to people's poems I either like or I don't like and it's because that most the language of most people's work is so polished it is dead--think of the Poet as the big furry thing in those Warner Bros. cartoons strangling the life out of a pretty thing, desiring to name it George. Their poetry lack ghosts. The poem has been busted.

I don't know if I have any right to say this--I can't write for shit most times and my work is fairly clear and accessible.

I guess I try to keep ghosts in it--one way to do this is to stay messy I think, if just a little messy. I don't want to be beautiful all the time; I always think of anti-lyric (not so much prosody as "how would I say this").

When I'd go back to Boisseau and tell her I didn't like the Old Male Poet she recommended, she somtimes would say "I don't either." I liked this a lot: she knows there is something of worth in people's work she doesn't agree with. I miss that right now.


4.

My friend Andrew's daughter Eleni did. She drew Tommy and called it "Tommy is sad."



Andrew asked her why Tommy looks up. She said "most people look up when they are sad."