Where Poems Come From response

Well, I'm interested to hear all your comments, and personally I really got a lot out of this film. It's so wide rangeing and I just love hearing from so many different writers about what they think poems are and how we can find them and create them. The part where Allen Ginsberg just starts beating out lines with cadence and rhythm reminds me of songwriting. Once a pattern or rhythm is set, you just have to find words and sounds to fit the pattern. That part really reminded me how much poetry is related to music.

I loved the section about Phil LeVine too and his dream about the visit from his friend in the factory and his terrible wife. Eugune Watkins from Detroit. Anyway, Levine took that dream as a warning and he said, "It was a warning. Don't turn your back on those people who were your life". Then he stayed home from teaching in his bed for a week and as a result he wrote two amazing books, What Work Is and A Walk With Tom Jefferson.

Well, I don't know if I can get by with missing work to write poems at my level of fame, ha ha, but I admire the devotion to a vision, and his words about not leaving behind those people who were your life makes a lot of connections with me. I come from farm country and very working class roots. In the university, I meet almost no professors and teachers who share my background, and it can be easy to dismiss my upbringing as unintellecual and important, but I know that the people I come from must always remain a priority for me, too. I don't want to forget where I come from or the fact that people in the lower economic classes are often looked down on in our stupid, consumer-based pop culture.

So the film had a lot of crazy, funny moments, but it also really made me think, and some of the thoughts were deeper than others, but that's what I got for now.