About

Phil Rockstroh  is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.

Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.

A bio can never speak the native tongue of the breathing moment. Rilke taught us: The language of soul is a terrifying angel: it does not comfort – it decimates our daily concerns because its vocabulary consists of the eternal; it’s grammar and syntax connects the narrative of all things. It speaks: Star, Ocean, Storm. It does not say: “Good Boy: You’ve been so well behaved, so filled with dignity and decorum, so utterly appropriate for your age and era. Good boy. Now, here’s your reward: a life free of doubt and uncertainty. Are you feeling better now? Good – Now back to work.”

Come discuss it with me at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Regarding my writing style: answer to a crackpot realist

I suspect my years in New Orleans saved/cursed me from being agenda-prone. I’m not of the reductionist school. I’m drawn to swamps … not so much the muck — but the mindfulness needed to negotiate the terrain. Of course, swamps will bog one down; yet I’m drawn to the cacophony and filtered light, and its graduations of green upon green … one must be slowed down to take it in. And the swamp exists for its own sake and doesn’t have to explain its mystery. It can be known, but its mystery is just that … ever growing, always dying.

I can’t seem to adapt to the right angles here in New York. The instant summations and curt dismissals — the endless self-regard of the unreflective.

What I’m trying to say, and sorry for the platitude, is I write the sort of thing I’d like to read. If it doesn’t interest me as I write it, I rewrite it or put it aside. Rilke said (paraphrasing) everyone has a letter written within and if you don’t live the life your heart wants to live … you don’t get to read this letter before you die. Ergo, I don’t mind the disapproval of the crackpot realist mindset. I don’t want a dead letter office piling up lost correspondence from my neglected heart.