My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

I grew up reading. Choose Your Own Adventure books, the Chronicles of Narnia, Hardy Boys, didn’t matter, I was always reading. I would read my sister’s set of Little House on the Prairie books. Girl books, boy books, I didn’t care.
I got older and discovered poetry. It appeals to people who believe in books. People who crave the order of our writing system but secretly cheer when an author is brave and breaks a rule like breaking an egg and something beautiful is revealed are the kind of people who love poetry. If you’ve ever bought a forty year old grammer text book because you love how a diagramed sentence looks, you probably have also stumbled across a few poems you enjoy.

I started reading poetry in my parent’s Yankee magazines. Yankee is published in Dublin, New Hampshire, a little town with maple trees turning pretty colors in autumn and that’s about it. They would feature articles about snow, moose, and lobster and publish poets who wrote in free verse. I loved the length of these poems. I think it was that shortness that drew me to them more than anything else. But also it was the strong sense of place these “local color” poems had. That whole magazine was a propaganda campaign designed to trick us into loving swampy bug infested land that blazed in the summer and froze in the winter.

In high school a red headed woman in her sixties who was still fit and wearing red frames for her reading glasses introduced me to the larger world of poetry. She wrote comments in swirling cursive that praised my ability to set a mood with the thunder storm, and my desire to understand other people and myself…

I was hooked. I felt like a craftsman, picking five or six words and looking at how many vowels they contained, how many letters they added up to, how many were derived from old french, and feeling like i truly understood those words, and could then arrange them into something with meaning. That was poetry for me: treating a single word as a physical thing with a dream inside it, and bending that word one way and then another so the dream changed shape as the word changed places with others. That was what I loved about it. Understanding that the physical relationship altered the meaning of things, and at 14 years old, a clumsy kid who twisted his ankle trying to stand on a skateboard, was afraid of the water and the sun and girls – I hadn’t found many physical things I could control and manipulate. So I started writing poetry.

I went to college to write poetry. To find an audience of other people who loved it and wouldn’t give a half frown and shake their head no if you asked them about poetry. It occurs to me that so many other poets were 14 when they began, and wanted that power because they were so weak everywhere else. Now we have a branch of the arts created by runts.

Let’s consider mature poetry.

There is so much you have to believe in before you believe in poetry. You have to believe first of all that books are very powerful. That hard covers house truths. That publishing houses are sending agents out across the land to find the very best spiritual leaders who have renounced city life and the internet and have gone back to the land to raise goats and write about the truths they discover. You have to believe that. That these book agents are renting bicycles and riding down dirt roads in Kansas because anyone who approaches the author in a motorized vehicle will not be given an audience. And this book agent rides the two and half miles through mudpuddles and shows up by the barn with his pants cuffs mudluscious and the poet continues to pull the goats teat while looking the book agent over, and finally says, “All right, I’ll give you some poems, but you gotta do it my way.”

If you don’t have that kind of background, then a book of poems isn’t gonna get you. You’ll have no reason to believe. You’ll remember back to the weakest kid ini high school and remember he was the one who wrote poetry, and you will equate all the 14 year old jon rolston’s and 14 year old girls, I don’t know their names because I didn’t talk to girls, but there were 14 year old girls writing poems, I’d find them in the halls, accidentally left on a desk after a class, you might have been one yourself. But we’ve grown up.

I don’t care about poetry as much as I used to. Is it because I bought myself a dog and boss it around? Is it because spiritual truths gleamed from midwestern goat farmers don’t speak to me? So I don’t read much poetry. Poetry and I have decided to see other people. I’m a modern man. I want moving images. Words were a stop gap story telling device until we could figure out how to get the visions in our head to come out alive. Words were middlemen. Now we have movies.

Writing is an elderly media. elderly, wheelchair bound, begging for a push from video. There is no reason to spend time reading when the vision can come quicker through video. Here I am writing about it, blogging about it, blogging, BLOGGING, when I should be Vlogging, i have all the equipment, but I’m old now too, and unsure of myself, confused about where the cable goes in, and how I get the sound adjusted. So I write. But I’d rather be making a movie.