[Newspoetry] more

[gillespie william k]

"We just read the papers, we just watch TV. Passive as the cattle, we
await our destiny." - Robyn Hitchcock

---------------------------------------------------------

IN THOSE YEARS

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I


-Adrienne Rich, from THE DARK FIELDS OF THE REPUBLIC

----------

What we want is a poetry of miracles -- minus the "I" of ecstasy! A poem
that as many people who read it each reads a different poem. A poetry
freed from its time.
A poetry that engages the Creation, which we believe is still in process,
and that it is entirely an imaginative construction, which our creative
acts partake of, and are
necessary to. We are all helping to imagine the Universe. 

Which means a poetry not caught and strangled on particular personalities.
A poetry that can see itself beyond its obvious means. 

And we wish above all to be thought of as "beneath contempt" by the
pompous, those who have stood their shadows over the more talented. 

How I despise the celebrity poet! 

                                                  10

...The self-serious poet with his terrible sense of mission, whose poems
are gradually decaying into sermons of righteous anger; no longer able to
tell the difference
between the external abstraction and the inner desperation; the inner life
is no longer lived or explored, but converted into public anger. 

Beware of serious people, for their reality is flat; and they have come to
think of themselves as merely flat paste-ons. Their rage at the flatness
of their lives knows no
end; and they keep all their little imitators scared to death... 

And they are meddlers, they try to create others in their own image
because theirs is failing... 

                                                  11

Poems of celebration in praise of a given reality are written by prayer
writers and decorators. They, of course, have heaven in mind. In their
bones they think they are
securing a place next to God. 

This kind of poet neglects content for form; always seeking the way to
write; thus, in extremity, form becomes content. The ersatz sensibility
that crushes vitality; the
how-to poets with their endless discussion of breath and line; the
polishing of the jewel until it turns into dust. 

Of course this kind of poem must try to express itself as celebration and
ecstasy, which is the empty mirror of soliloquy, the "I" poem, where the
poet can't get past
himself. 

This is boring because it is not creative, it is middle-class mercantile
morality. It is for those who in the name of craft, their hope of heaven,
refuse to write poetry.
Because at the heart of the "I" poem is little imagination and total lack
of humor; only the sensitive, self-serious soliloquist, who seems so dated
and tiny in the box of
mirrors he has built up around himself. 

-----------


...A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the
necessities of fiction; a personal form disciplined not by other
literature but by unhappiness; thus
a way to be happy. 

-Russel Edson