Welcome to Night Ambles. This is the portal to
a unique collection of poetic expressions.
The unique part is easy. My voice – like your own – is one
of a kind. Much of the technology that I have used in creating this body of work did
not exist a generation ago. I do, however, hope I have managed some poetry at
times in writing and speaking these words.
Let me put it like this: If he looks like a homeless man and
walks like a homeless man and he is talking to himself – occasionally
gesticulating to no one visible - he might not be the ghost of Walt Whitman
stalking the earth. He still might be just a would-be poet – nonetheless.
I have sometimes joked that I am the sanest person that I
know very well. But then, I would say that even if I were crazy. A good friend
of mine used to joke about wearing a headset so that he could talk to himself
while walking alone without people thinking that he was crazy. And you might ask Lewis Carroll about rabbit holes.
This past summer, my thoughts were keeping me awake. I sometimes
walked the night streets and talked into a digital device. These unscripted
conversations – monologues, directed at real people that I imagined might have
been walking along with me – became a kind of heart for this collection. The recordings are raw –
but considered – speech. I call them ambles. There is still more explanation of this
‘form’ inside the digital collection, but it should suffice to say that the process has informed me. Most
people will simply be more interested in more finished writing.
I have also added poems and word sketches that I have
written onto a page to this collection – reading most of them into YouTube
audios. You can both listen to and read my voice through these blog pages if
you want to.
The common thread throughout Night Ambles is love and relationships. Those words alone turn out
to not be enough, which is why I have a collection of many more words here.
If you are reading this, it is because you know me and have
shown some interest in my writing. This would be, I suppose, a subset of my
Walk to the river writings.
This is also another invitation for you to listen to my
voice. I already am grateful that you like me for all sorts of other reasons. I
am considering how to share some of what I have done here more traditionally.
This collection, however, is for now part of a currently unlisted cloud location which
you can access by permission of the poet. I already think that I generally write
well enough for myself. If you listen to or read any of this work and think
that I should try to share some of it with people that I don’t know, I would
welcome your comments.
But here’s one more joke with the punchline pulled: If I
were a mother, all my babies would look beautiful to me. You might talk among
yourselves and say that you think that these poems and othr writing just look and sound a lot like me – and that my
uncle was an orangutan – not J. Alfred Prufrock. But these are only words, not
babies, after all. I am simply working squarely in a very broad tradition of poetry - at
the least, to make some sense for myself. I mostly hope to see beauty and meaning in life
more clearly. But there is more to life than words.
I admire Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Wendell Berry, Annie
Dillard and others. If you choose to ‘enter’ the Night Ambles blog, the voice you will hear is simply mine. I am
attempting to put my experience – my thoughts and feelings – into poetry.
Poetry is a form of self-expression that in any particular instance may or may
not resonate with the reader or listener. You and I are much more than our
words and much more even than we know of ourselves. But words and poetry are a
way to begin.
I very much like to be alone with myself – but only because
I have so many people I can be with when I don’t want to be alone. Thank you
for listening if and when you have some time. Or we could just walk together sometime
without words. Have you seen our world – lately? There is beauty among the
debris of human mistakes if you look for it. And let’s face it, nature is not
always kind. But sometimes …
And now I have left some of my words here in Night Ambles for you to consider. I
don’t always know what I mean by what I say, but I love you.
**
You will have to ask for access to Night Ambles and I will then add your email address to a blog list of allowed readers. I
want to be clear that if you listen to various parts of the blog and then you decide
to move on to other things, I will not offended. This project has already been
very satisfying for me. Once again, I do welcome your thoughts.
Or perhaps, you can use some of these thoughts
that sometimes kept me awake at night to put you to sleep when a low, droning,
meandering voice set at half volume near your bedside is just what you need. That's
fine too. I'm just trying a different way to publish here. I do think I have captured something now and
then in my work. So I offer this collection of ambles and poems in my voice.
Listen in or not as you please.
Bert Haverkate-Ens
Link to: After midnight - an edited amble
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