Matt B. Perkins

To want to learn

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I have always loved poetry. The song of it. The lines and stanzas. The irregular patterns. The arrhythmia of thought. The stoic voices of those poets I have loved hearing echo off the wind.

But I’ve never studied poetry in depth beyond the surface of what a poem is, what rhyme is. I took a class in Boston once, and loved it, but the exploration stopped there. I’ve never dug deep enough to really understand the roots of the forms poetry can take, have never really looked under the hood and tried to understand its workings. Sometimes, it seems to me, it doesn’t even have workings. A poem can be nothing more complex than an exhale on the page. Don’t be fooled — such an exhale can ripple into gusts of wind, and later a hurricane. But still, there are things to understand.

I want to learn.

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Shifts in the path

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A little while ago I brought forth the idea of what I’ve called “Practice Notes” — personal practical experiments in various areas of creativity and spirituality.

The point in these “practices” is to try to embed them into my life where I have otherwise previously avoided them, due to my own resistance, fear, and anxiety.

The first two practices have been . . . interesting.

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The practice of practice

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Over the years, this blog has taken on many a form. From ramblings to documentation of my own work, to musings on what I’ve believed to be creative truths (not absolute truths, but my own truths as revealed through trial and error) — it’s gone down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

Then I went on a hiatus — for two years.

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Practice 002: Read 4 books in 30 days

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I’ve long had a love for books, particular traditional hardcover or paperback books (and even more in particular, paperback), with some exceptions to ebooks and audiobooks. The main problem for me over the past 10-15 years is that I’ve hauled in books more quickly than I can read them.

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Practice 001: Meditate twice a day for 30 days

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Meditation has called to me for nearly 15 years in some form. It first caught my attention in my early 20s, during a time I’ll call my “Kerouac” phase — a time when I was completely smitten with the Beat Generation, particularly the work of Jack Kerouac. It was his book The Dharma Bums that introduced me to Buddhism, and from there, I began to read about and study Buddhism in my own time, dabbling in various forms of meditation and reading many books (and not reading even more, with many still to read).

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They spoke after midnight

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NOTE: I sketched this some years back, essentially writing what came to me as I listened to a piece of improv from one of my favorite bands, Phish (a rather elegant candle-lit ambient “After Midnight” jam from their Big Cypress festival). This is what I “saw” upon deep listening, and so, I sketched that scene. I should note that I’ve posted this in some form on previous incarnations of my blog/site, and I felt now was a good time to resurrect it.

Flickerlight in glass while the black backdrop fades into poor visibility. Mad scientist at the keys, bald head except for the sides, a man in front weaves six threads along a stitched thin neckboard and the flickerlight continues. Oh, they dance along to the midnight rhythms that hint at something, something’s at play, yes yes, there’s no one here to watch, they see all but none see them, and the speckled cotton shirt comforts the front man’s skin as it protects him from chafe, then to the left, another, mushroom-haired one jerks his head about along with the flickers, his fingers pop along thicker weaves, and only five threads for him, and he stands still, but the first, the six-thread weaver isn’t weaving anymore . . . he’s writing, using a short thin pen, flat and ink-less, but he’s writing nonetheless, the words printed in the void, the pageless page. 

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