trying to get back what i lost, maybe.

i am, as of about 15 minutes ago, reading Nota by Martin Corless-Smith. he put it in my hand several years ago at a poetry reading (i think i paid for it. either way, he signed it.) but i never actually tried to read it until just now.

why do i wait so long to do things? this poetry is difficult and wandering and musical and PEACEFUL somehow. martin was one of my professors at boise state, where i got my MFA. when i say that he was brilliant, what i mean is that i couldn't understand a fucking word he said, and even that isn't true. i understood some of the fucking words he said, and it was at those times (within my moments of grasping, even for a split second, the densely abstract thinkymadness with which martin tried to enrich me/us) that i KNEW poetry was about so much more than whatever was going on inside a head or a heart at any moment.

i could feel things outside the greedy realm of selves (students and a prof in a cramped classroom, let's say) converging and conspiring to create a moment of almost random purity i couldn't even articulate, let alone try to capture. i don't think i ever got to thank him for that, or for wine, or for food, or for crashings at his house, or for humoring me in any of the million ways in which he MUST have humored me during my three years under his tutelage. i'm bad at thanking people for things, and (sometimes) that's a shame.

all this to say, martin, i loved your classes and i dig your book. and thank you.

-m