The Lost Edge

Dear Friends,

A few days ago I was part of a reading and conversation here in Provincetown: The Lost Edge of Bohemia. Was Provincetown ever Bohemian? Was it still? How did we feel about the word and its meanings?

We were brought together by

Kathe Izzo

through bonds of friendship and love, some going back decades. Six poets: Kathe, me, Eileen Myles, Pat Kearns, Oona Patrick, and Mackenzie. We all felt the edge. The edge like a shore, always changing.

There is a vision, in the idea of the “Bohemian,” of how the world could be, should be. In the world that it imagines, everyone lives according to their deepest desires.

What I remember of my early years in Provincetown back in the mid-’80s, back in the ‘90s: I was living life but at the same time trying to invent life, trying to make with my own body a future full of my imaginings. It felt as if we could reach some pitch of living where we congregated in great pods like whales do, singing and singing. To feed, we would only have to open our mouths.

I wrote this for Kathe and the poets, but I didn’t read it. It wasn’t ready, or I wasn’t. Instead I read some other paragraph poems, including one I had published here not long ago, “A Spell for You.”

Bohemia is an idea that lives just out of reach. Yet if Bohemia is what we lost, then it is also what we were, and everything we were stays in us even as we are always losing it.

— Sal

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¶ The Lost Edge of Bohemia

Where are the singing poets and where are the cold poets and where are the poets at play in language? Where are the prayers and the incantations? The invocations are spoken into the bare earth and the earth remains bare. What was it, exactly, that we loved? Whatever it was that we loved, we loved it more than money. What money meant was freedom and what freedom meant was love and art — a tangle of contradictions. We didn’t know any better. It seemed like the new life and obviously we were living it. It was always a fantasy it was always a romance, a seduction of time. It’s hard out there. I’m never as free as I want to be. And I will return to the house and return to the bed. And I will sleep and wake again. And I need to know. I am looking at my open hand, the palm meeting space and space extending everywhere. What they can only accept. What the music asked of me. Beside me on the couch, an open book. Does it matter where the poems went? Between the hand and ear, between the morning and the end, between what is gotten and what is left.

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This is Kathe’s image for the event, one that is still haunting me.

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I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you think or how you are feeling. What are your deepest desires, and what have you lost?

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Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara