Everyone Launch Your Own Poetics: Telling Like It Is/IMHO

Writing a poem is the expansion of the rules you accept as needed to fulfill the definition of a poem as you see it, and yet this is still one of the hardest things.

We know what we want to do but even talking about it seems to be a chore.

Even if you have eradicated all the red and blue and green marks that appear on the computer screen, placed the verses just so, fulfilled the general sense of what the language of a poem seems to have as its basic notion, and made some witty twist occur at the end to Zen koan the reader into a moral dilemma or addiction breaking frenzy, there is still the honesty.

Really, what seems to be the driving force of language is this ability to take a non-self-conscious look at oneself while you are looking, breath taking truth.  This seems to almost always have a spiritually beautiful effect or else the devastating gravity of our finding the worst of ourselves as never having been hidden that well in the first place, and we have just now discovered that feigning and whining has hidden nothing, fooled no one, and left us with the circumspect notion that the general state of ennui that we have used as a shielding identity is just after all a slathering of inept and immature avoidances, relegated to the socially retarded and lazy minded. To think in any way that you have your shit together is its own mindfuck, and so the thing to do is to report the news of life because nothing is more godforsaken weird than what really happens, and this is why we hear people say so often, "You cannot make this shit up."

And so, in the end, it is the classic work of cleaning the poem up of its dangling participles and misplaced modifiers, but also of clearing the house of all of the dogmatic banter and self-conscious crap that has been the fruitless liturgy of a life time.

Repeating the same old wounds from a thousand angles and bitching about the unfairness of it all is after all just bullshit.  Fuck fairness.  And the sense that there is going to be some incredible way of saying you saw nature, banged the fuck out of some chick, or in some way tasted the incredible succulence of life at some ripe moment is really just wanking off, isn't it?

So, it gets down to doing the work of keeping your nose clean, seeing what is there, opening your eyes and reporting the incredible interdependence as an array of sensitivities that we in fact have no control over.  The best we can do is to faithfully be ourselves.  If you're a sex goddess, go at it with everything you've got.  If you are attempting to understand your ADD, well then turn on the full weight of the experience and see yourself through to the other side.  If madness is your game, then be a raving lunatic.  If making love to a grapefruit is the best you can do, well then have breakfast all day long.  But whatever it is, don't eddy up on a point and wear it the fuck out.  Live it, explore it, know it, and then digest it.  Growth is where poetry does its best work, and the person who writes poetry is in for a lifetime of it, a bed full of it, a soul of transformation and self-indulgent exploration, if he or she has the belly for it.

If you are only eeking out a dribble of poems, hardly write except when the mood strikes you, hardly a poem every once in a while, get off your ass.  Get to work.  This language is not going to write itself.  Poets are the architects of language.  Consciousness is not going to just drop out of the sky.  We have to build it into the fabric of the words and change the monster from the inside.  This is why we need master craftsman to shape and fabricate the mental images that drive the sense of the new horizon, the New Mythology of being, to evolve the mind of culture and society, and so there is no time to waste and every pen needs to be at the ready, for as they say, the game is afoot, so choose your meter wisely.

runningturtle87