Our journey through the universe includes an ongoing struggle with loss, which is the translation of the Newton's second law of thermodynamics describing the process of the disintegration of the universe, "the measure of ongoing loss of heat which is irreversible." In short, the universe is running out of energy as losing heat perpetually as reality disintegrates. Our aging might be regarded as a form of entropy. Entropy is a measure of Time, and Time is running out.
But Life itself stands as the reversal of entropy, and evolution the measure of progress toward achieving spiritual well-being. This dimension exists outside the realm of the physicists who can see only the eventual death of the universe burning out in silent disintegration.
Losing something is a natural part of the process of aging. Most of us have experienced loss where we have been able to retrieve the lost item, but this is more about something being misplaced, rather than lost. True loss can be traumatic such as the passing of friends and love ones. True loss is irretrievable, and sometimes such losses can be so severe as to permanently scar our sensibility and sense of well-being.
I began writing when I was about eight years old. When I was nine I submitted an essay on astronomy to an International Newspaper sponsoring an essay contest. My parents were surprised, because they never knew I had entered the contest.
By the time I was eighteen, I had become obsessed with Walt Whitman and took on the mantle of wandering around my hometown and stopping at bars and coffee houses to write poems. I wrote in blank tablets and small blank books. I had filled so many blank pads that I carried them around in a brown paper bag, to have them as references. I always carried them with me.
When I went to New York City to study at Columbia University, I took the bag of poems with me. Now I had New York City as a catalyst for continuing my quest as a poet. I found a wonderful large green blank book that became the main canvas for my poetic wanderings.
It happened on a summer afternoon on the subway in New York City. I always traveled with my bag of poems.There was no reason to do that, except from time to time, I liked to read from these books as I wandered around New York City. I exited from the subway at 116th street. It wasn't until I emerged onto the street on this bright day in early August, that I realized I had left the bag of poems on the subway seat beside me.
Losing those poems left a permanent scar. I lost part of who I had become, at least the evidence and mapping that had shaped my observations and awareness. I lost a connection with Time that I could never recover. For a while, I thought I could reconstruct the poems, but there was just too many, and they were born in the heat of the moment. Their existence extended the moment.
Losing my poems on the subway was traumatic and disfiguring, almost like losing a a hand or an arm. Those poems had been born in the heat of the moment, and in those lines, Time lingered in the words, asserting the moments of awareness of Now as permanent markers, retrievable and reassuring.
For a while, I wandered aimlessly as though I might come upon the lost works through some serendipitous gesture of magical calculation. "Keep looking forever"--- and you may find them in some twist of a moment on the dark side of the moon where chaos lapses into order.
But once I became reconciled that those poems were irretrievable, I thought there should be some way to acknowledge the loss, and like the fabled Phoenix, rise above the devastating experience by creating a new set of poems, Lost Works.
These new poems would not be a requiem, but rather an affirmation, an echoing presence seeking the essence of those works that rattled off to oblivion in the New York subway. I knew I could not recreate the lost poems, but I could enter the creative space that served to discover the original poems. For me, poetry was and is, a way of Noticing. The value of the lost works were their testament to the moment and the act of uncovering beauty from the routine gaze of monotony to an intense awareness of the joy of life.
Even though the lost poems were gone forever, they remain a permanent part of my Being in Time, and they give place and revere my indiscretion, my negligence, and celebrate works created only because of the loss. I needed to acknowledge my destructive gesture, because in once sense it was a deliberate moment meant to break with the past.
It also came at a time when I had to reconcile the challenge of T. S. Eliot aimed at undermining Whitman as the dominant spirit of American Poetry. Into the tempest of uncertainty, T. S. Eliot journeyed to England to assume the authority and arbiter of poeticism in the English language. Eliot was a brilliant poet, and his passage to England eliminated him as the true arbiter of American poetry, but established him as the poet laureate of an era that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. I had to reconcile my creative process and work in an atmosphere dominated by Eliot. I think every poet revisits the spirit and essence of their own creative process and work. Poet's like Walt Whitman challenged the dominance of the English Giants, demanded a new cadence for expression.
I think at the time, I regarded T. S. Eliot as the prophet for the renaissance of English Poetry. But I was a poet of the Texas plains and the New York terrain, alone with my blank books, creating my own sensibility of how the poet noticed an emerging world and recorded his encounters with Time. I did not see a waste land as in the eyes of Eliot's 1922 poetic critique of London in aftermath of World War I. I saw a world on an optimistic brink of technology to inspire human creativity. Technology was creating the link between science and the arts.
My new poems replacing the lost works are a celebration of the creative spirit and it's connection to the process of our perpetual becoming. It reminds me that I have always approached my work as "the best is yet to come." Lost Works inspired me to share my work, at first anonymously as a website, Poet's Passage, which became my first publication, emphasizing the "noticed" rather than the "noticer." Thus the poems were launched into cyberspace as something to be discovered that in some sense was "permanently lost" in its anonymity, without benefit of fanfare or social media. Even the structure of the website was designed to enable to reader to discover where the poet's passage might lead.
Time smooths the rough edges of all that is lost. Even Poet's Passage will dissolve into cyberspace as that Domain eventually expires and we discover another realm not dependent on computer code. In some ways, all of our creations have their moment as flares lighting our conscious awareness. It is that awareness that fuels reality as a figment of human consciousness.
