Poetic Manifesto

Note #1:

Poetry is a sustaining activity.

Note #2:

Poetry is a need of those who have little, thus it is given no place in a society of excess.

Note #3:

That society of excess, which some said would lead to greater learning, more refined consciousness, or really just everyone listening to Mozart and reading Hegel, has managed to take over and destroy almost everything capable of being subsumed...including, or especially, as the first casualty, most art.

Note #4:

Because poetry is not easily palatable it has been left to die.  Because it cannot be made into a mass commodity, despite efforts of the literary establishment, university writing programs, and above all the poets of that establishment, it remains something viable, something capable of sustaining memory, history, shreds of reality, humanity, resilience, rebellion and love.

Note #5:

Profit and corporation has poisoned everything but it has not yet poisoned poetry.  This is missed by those who write about poetry, always from the establishment of poetry.  That establishment, which claims its own absurd self-importance, is completely ignored by those in power, by corporations, by those who distribute art.  The only rebellious poetry allowed is approved rebellious poetry.  That establishment, and every poet who is a part of it, is worthless and worthy of ridicule no matter how good the poetry is.  I’m thinking right now of Billy Collins.  I’m thinking less of Seamus Heaney.  I’m thinking not at all of Bolano, Bukowski, or Rimbaud, no matter how precious they become now, dead and unable to defend themselves.

Note #6:

Poetry, like love, does not have a direct answer to systems.  It is sustaining resilience.  It preserves what would be killed off: like impossibility, like the unreal, like love other than seen in the movies, like kindness, like courage of a kind not exploited for wars.  It corrodes those systems, like water, slowly and consistently, like winter freezing and unfreezing the pavement into numerous deadly potholes.  It refuses to go away.  It gnaws at systems.  It is always opposed.  That is the work of poetry.  To simultaneously preserve and oppose.  That is why poetry has no ideology, no “politics”, even while it must always be profoundly political.

Note #7:

That is the work of poetry, to simultaneously preserve and oppose.

Note #8:

I think you all know this, but you have become very lazy and very comfortable.  

Note #9:

The only way anything is written is to refrain from thinking at all about who will read it.  Cave paintings, errant footprints, William Blake.

Note #10:

Everyone is not about to start reading poetry.  I don’t imagine the Greeks sitting around reading Homer.  Of course not, they didn’t read.  I can imagine them listening to Homer, maybe once in their lives, another traveling man with the misfortune to be blind, telling tales to get safe passage to the next island.  I can imagine them sitting around at night, retelling variations on those stories.  Even that is being too optimistic.  Mostly I imagine the Greeks getting drunk when life was too heavy and working hard to survive the rest of the time.  I imagine them as distracted as we are with their spare time.  Or impossibly bored, which amounts to the same thing.  Society is not about to better itself.  Everyone isn’t about to read Homer when they have a Playstation.  No one read the Irish monks who kept the ideas of those Greeks alive through the dark times until all the monks were long dead and only their illuminated manuscripts survived.  

Note #11:

Poetry, calcified and self-satisfied like all other culture in this society, is as unprepared as everything else for the situation to change utterly. 

Note #12:

Poetry, because it is a basic urge, not merely an art, can survive the change of everything.  The only thing that ceases poetry is constant distraction, since poetry is born out of memory, longing and boredom.  That distraction is what cannot, no matter what they say, last.

Only the form of your body

All bodies are real to me. You do not exist in memory or reality without being in the world. All is present in things, and only things matter. Only the form of your body, the force of its movement in will through the world, matters. I have to imagine you receiving my letter with legs folded under your body as you sit on a bed in a room you no longer rent. This makes you no less real, makes reality no less real, but infuses it with enough meaning to give life to what would be dead.

All You Need to Know

I found myself telling a story, consumed by the generalities of narrative and the urge to make universal by way of flatness. There’s the generality, which wants to be something to everyone, but not very much, and the specificity, which is a thousand times more ecstatic, bound up in memory, and quivering with alive but in conversation gives us back blank faces, downcast eyes. Caught in the generality and suddenly wondering where the wonder has gone. This is a vision and a revision, a memory of arbitrary specifics, a dream you are sharing with a will behind it.

We met and began to fall in love in Spain, in Granada, the city that no one wants to leave but I had to leave on a 3am bus still a bit high, a bit drunk. I had to meet her in the north, in Bilbao after university finished a few weeks later. She somehow found me at the airport though maybe we barely remembered each other. She’d found a pension to stay at. The room was large and all white, with dark wood furniture and a balcony over a small old street. We didn’t know how to know each other. We didn’t know how to make love to each other. I barely knew how to make love. We spoke, faltering. We made love. We made love for days. I don’t remember how many. We’d leave only to go for walks, sometimes not until evening. We drank wine and ate olives on the small balcony. We began the slow process of knowing each other. We began to learn the words that the other used. Our two languages fought, though sparingly, joking, not knowing how serious a problem their inability to communicate would become. We couldn’t know how little we understood of the other. We visited the famous museum, through curved shining forms, through dulled rusted tunnels. We walked over many bridges, talking, listening, trying to hear. We made love many times a day in that white room. I was deliriously in love, so much that memory falters. A black man, there are few in Spain, sang old American songs down on the street. We played a game of believing he sang to us. We left the curtains open, the windows open all night. It was June. Late one morning the woman at a higher window across the street, working in a carpet shop, must have seen us making love. We hoped that she watched for a while. We hoped it was beautiful because we believed ourselves to be beautiful. We believed ourselves to be beautiful because we were in love and delirious, drunk on ourselves, the way we should be when we fall in love. Exactly as we should be, innocent as we should be and are, completely naive and raw for life. A touch of cynicism could have killed us, a bare mention of a steeled rational plot, but none came for us.

I fell in love in Spain, gorgeously, without hesitation, and did not look back. When she left down the Metro stairs in Paris I didn’t look back. I’d played Bruce Springsteen to her on the way to Paris to try and get her to stay. I couldn’t understand that her French mind didn’t know what to make of the lyrics that saved me. I spent days wandering the streets of that museum-city, sometimes visiting museums. I don’t know what I ate. I don’t know what I did, except walk and read, sometimes write, but I don’t know what I wrote; there’s a journal now with little in it. I sat by the Seine and watched Parisians. I drank beer, or wine, I don’t know. I paid too much to keep our double room because we’d danced there crying before she left. The owner spoke no English anyway. He asked where she’d gone. Elle voyager, a few words I could remember. I lay in bed all day in the heat, sweating into sheets, taking a shower when it was too much. I watched the apartment next door have a dinner party through multiple windows. I watched some of the World Cup games in French, or the news channels without understanding at all. How many days? I don’t know. I’ve never figured it out. A week? It seems impossible. What I remember as one day in the room could have been three, or more. I didn’t talk to anyone. I found an internet cafe down the street and wrote to her a few times. Eventually I bought a plane ticket to Berlin and that moment ended.

When we met again we were far from Spain, far from falling in love. In love but uncertain, knowing nothing of each other but our love. We began again.

P.S. - I've left out the Chinese restaurant, the beach and her beauty along the rocks, the endless hunk of cheese bought at a market and carried for days, the tapas of San Sebastian, my absolute shyness at trying to speak Spanish, the restaurant in Guerncia thinking about Picasso and Franco's bombs, these and thousands of other things...but you aren't supposed to know that.