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Pastimes : Ask John Galt...
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To: barb loucks who wrote (3302)5/24/1997 11:33:00 PM
From: Ignacio Mosqueira   of 4006
 
Hello Barb,

I must apologize for taking so long to reply. Perhaps it is a kind of laziness of the mind that leads us to procrastinate when faced with those whose thoughts are worthwhile pursuing. Suddenly I am confronted by someone who asks for something more than the commonplace stock of preconditioned responses -- a bag of familiarities so full and so empty that it exhausts us all and yet
it leaves nothing behind -- and I find myself savoring the event. You did not reduce my words to the usual: "I like it/I do not like it". For that I thank you. Often there is nothing which swallows meaning with as much relish as decorum and reduces all discourse to a thin plastic veneer, to an infestation of bantering tedium, to the liberal and mindless polish of every edge. I can not agree with this. It is a sacrifice more dear than I am prepared to take even for those closest to me. Numbers do not matter.

Yet I am not alone. It is not my intention nor my mood to wallow or find satisfaction or even conformt in persecuting or being persecuted. So I must confess myself delighted by your willingness to step away from the overhanging collective expectations. But there are other ways in which I am not alone. There are others besides me who have much to offer to a poetry forum if only they were allowed to do it in their own terms. To term their feelings antisocial or some such epithet or to try to stipulate the terms of their offering is, essentially, to misunderstand the nature of the gift. Much rides with the reader of poetry. Solitude reaches a point of no return when poetry loses its power. The reader is also a creator. And so I believe that my words came alive when they were recreated and inspected, taken as a whole and by parts, and most of all allowed inside (so that they may find themselves) a reader. For this I can only be grateful to you and Panama. Without you the poem, unable to accomplish that which it speaks of, must be seem as impotent. Perhaps you will enjoy knowing that these thoughts have given birth to another stanza. It is now strange to me that only a few days back I thought the poem complete. But poems are alive so long as we are. Again, numbers do not matter: if the reader was willing to recreate the whole one can well be all if need be.

Ignacio
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