Hunger & Ethics: Poetics

I am on, and on and on right now, in defense of or maybe more in definition, of Poetics.

Of my poetics.

O damn craving for self-education!

Scratch that. I am neither defending, nor defining. Nor even educating. I am discovering. giving words to...I am becoming. Battling. Staking claim.

But the idea of defense, and thus definition that I myself may know and claim just what it is I am striking out on behalf of--is pertinent. Because, as I've said and said again. Poetry is a lifestyle. It is not even a choice. It's, well like W.D. Snodgrass says in this interview, a lifelong thing:

If you can be happy doing anything else, do it. George P. Elliott once told me that. This is what he always told people. Everything pays better. Everything is more honestly rewarded.

But if you’ve got to do it, then you’re a life-termer.

I’ve had a lot to do with pacifist organizations. In one of their publications there is a story about a young pacifist who is thrown in prison. He is in on the main floor with all the new guys, and he’s cracking up. Some of the prisoners go to the warden and ask him to do something. They put the new guy up on the top floor with the life-termers, because they had nothing to win. They didn’t have to put anybody down. They were just there. And that’s how it was going to be, and they had to get along. In a few days he settled back down again and he was all right.

Yes. So what do you with a condition that Snodgrass, the "first" confessional, actually compares to being on the ward, cracking up?

You just, you know. Do it. Because it's the fighting it that causes the dismantling, the shaking break down, or worse, as you all artists know: the numb dumb condition. The struck thin and dusty on the inside because no how, no matter what, no matter what else you're doing, if you're not engaged in the work at your baseline You Are Unhappy.

So that it's not how and who you choose to be, as I've claimed in the past, but rather how and who you accept yourself as?

Making choice merely a matter of responsibility to this inherent condition...

Bringing me back round again to The Real Work. Gary Snyder's Zen of being in the moment in all that you do--an idea transferred from the act of meditating, and poem as means of meditation. Perfect in-moment form. Wat Joe Campbell calls peak experience. And to approach it with this placement of commitment, then Poetry becomes the political, too. The experience of being fully engaged.

Adrienne Rich so adeptly seizes us with this idea in her pocketsize pink-jacketed copy of the lecture Poetry and Commitment:

Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that "new" individual artists can't be manufactured: art is a part of society--but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can't foresee from where we now stand. "One must speak," Gramsci wrote, "of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality..."

In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the "the poetry of false problems"--and a poetics searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can be thought or said. For now, poetry has the capacity--in its own ways and by its own means--to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossesion, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom (italics mine)--that word now held under arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. Its elementary condition is the recovery and redistribution of the world's resources that have been extracted from the many by the few.

Making Poetry, aside from a dedicated act of pen and paper, too an ethic.

Which brings me just a few steps closer on the path of my search to the necessity of, as I used to teach my ESL students in order to understand and assimilate, la lengua del gente. The folk lore. Tho in this case not meant literally, but meant as the on the side in the countrysides scribes and tatters of paint and pen. The language of the people. Not anti old white authoritarian, (o fuck dont even get me started on the Cannon, Bloom...) but at least Other than...

(It's not revisionist, afterall, if it's reality?)

And so then, of course, there's the Duende. (Jesus, for pure tru lifeblood O Mighty Poets get your hands on Lorca's essay The Deep Song paragraphs 17-19.) Duende originally what Federico Garcia Lorca is speaking of when he lectures on the value of preserving the cante jando, or deep song, a style specific to flamenco Andalusian music of Spain. After time spent in the juke joints and jazz stops on the east coast of the States in the early 30's, however, Lorca, (like that other tipping pointer of note who found his voice in the same haunts and so influenced whole generations as result--Keroac) assimilated his idea od Duende to include it as a quality: The great artists of the south of Spain, whether Gypsy or flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, kow that no emotion is possible unless the duende comes. They may be able to fool people into thinking they have duende--authors and painters and literary fashionmongers do so evry day--but we have only to pay a little attentio and not surrender to indifference in order to discover the fraud and chase away their clumsy artifice.

And I hate to be exclusive, folks. But I gotta say. I know about that. About the duende. And it is this, this quality, I care most about.

Few. FEW have it. But you know, you know when you come across those that do.

Icould go on and on. But will end with this~

My own belief--experiential which you all know is what matters most to me--that on the short end of Dunede lay the distinct and personal in-road to serendipity, to the fine fire of consciousness where in Poetry, as motion, as pure force energy, as nebuli waiting for form, quakes and breathes. And this archetypal draw brings in to cohesion all levels of serendipity, of synchronicity, to see to it that the inroad not only be cultivated, but remained as pure power force, and utilized. Entelechy. Humanism=Source Spirit, in motion. For example:

I am writing right now at the CoffeeCat in Easton. Midway thru this post, a guy who I met weeks ago at a show sat down with me. We met through KJ, who's one of those tipping point people. Tom, the guy, made me promise aloud as he pulled out a chair that I wasn't working. I told him I was, but that I was working on the only work I really cared about. And of course! this guy turns out to be a writer, too. He was published in this e-zine and is currently working on his first full selection of short stories.

I want the tribe I want the tribe I want the tribe. Cuz I need the ones who know. Who get what it means to be on the verge of crack-up anytime you go too long denying who you are...