On Poetry

Hail and farewell, as forever, my dear brothers.

The night rolls on thick and after a singular dilemma-- off to the strip club or back to solemn keys(?)-- my answer grew self evident. Word are my mistress tonight.

It is long overdue, it is long wet and ripe from the peach vine, but late and loud triumph above every instance of early silence. Truly-- I admit-- dollar wine and my nightly allowance of one(two)-tobacco coarse these veins mine. But onto matters.

Brother Nero has commenced a bold endeavor into poetry. And I wish to speak on that subject with full honesty. Forward, as best this corpse may attempt.

I categorically despised poetry.
A few choice verses occasionally permeated my dutiful walls-- things of Donne, Catullus, yes lines of Frost dripped in, Shakespeare sonnets and lines of Blake snuck past my checkpoint fully armed. Spencer and Dante, every example safely dead, would be deigned canonically prudent for room within my brain space. Secure heritage in a museum mind, extinct examples of rare horticulture in their properly proportioned thoughtscape. Painfully duty-free.


I am on the porch now, sipping a hard lemonade, and nursing a 79c cigar-- heavy winds are toppling winter trees. The foot of a  kill-sized branch is caught against my steps. I am tight bound by product addictions/dependencies and yet under siege by fantastic winds. Elements which remain outside of my control or choice. (I'm throwing out words half-thoughtlessly, but edited surfaces are not the thing of Senate.) These are significant somehow.


It's an inherited cultural distaste. Poetry is a vanity made lyrical, pawned off quick-cheaply and overly-earnest. A thing immediately suspect. It's motivations assuredly puerile. It is the written apparition of everything we hold suspect and superfluous of our mind. A poet yearns for significance, at the cheapest price and mildest exertion. I assure myself. We do.

But nearly every strong emotion, particularly those unexamined, should be held suspect. Casual hatred is the most difficultly shrugged, and most embarrassing. Full honesty and disclosure. Poetry was a club I felt always unprepared to attempt-- how do you learn the tools of an "honesty" criticism? How does one judge the essentially subjective?

I remember being very fortunate. As a much younger man, my high school hosted a yearly writers conference-- the only serious offering in the region. I was fortunately cursed to have regional semi-non-celebrities encourage me there toward fiction at a young age-- encouragement is gasoline to young formative vanity. But these authorities would talk of an alcoholically tragic poet who wrote of hawks in a numbing beauty. A poet whose name I could never resurrect and unduly forgot. Somewhere lurking behind a page was the good, true poet.

Sincere moments are swiftly forgotten through the course of sex, addictions and narcissism of adulthood's birth. But poet, as a formal definition, was out there.

Liquor drives me to waste words. And I crave my product withdrawn nic-fix.

Roberto Bolano phrased it first and hardest, "Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated . . . . Only poetry isn’t shit." To paraphrase a life-- Bolano was an expatriated Chilean poet who aspired to an exulted European height that living's price prevented-- children need food and poems don't pay. He compromised out his ass a few good novels and secured himself a legacy, but he internalized a guttural lesson: prose are for profit.

To talk at any length about "commercial" encroachment is tragically banal. Sad and obnoxiously late. What rebel argument remains-- do we re-fight each battle of Antietam? Dollar dictates what you see and what we may choose. It's results are generationalized and form the arteries of every cultural/pragmatic product we encounter. Every J.K. Rowling adds to a Rushmore of billion dollar proportion-- and who can assume to care otherwise, the product always sell. It is unnecessary to examine the corruption of each sacred aspect/expression in our experience-- only to emphasize the want for purity.

But despite the marketing campaigns,  the re-branding attempts and empty book signing-- poetry does not sell. It is something wrong in this present. What it is, does not transfer efficiently into profit. There may be unimpressive exceptions-- as few undergraduate bookshelves lack a census copy of e.e.cummings work, Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg.  But Poetry isn't profit-- only the hyphenated biography of the poet can cram their work down even the most receptive throat. We buy the poet at their cultural personality price, but hesitate long before any one poem.

Poetry is a dinosaur construct that can't find a modern home. It is an eloquence birthed foremost from the dark. Is it just a mirror of it's creator.

Consider this wide attempt a buckshot worth-- I am lost to my liquor weave, once more of the wheat-- one last blessed bud can, one old remaining sacred cigar to see me through the cravings. O' lord the wind she blows.

Only Poetry isn't shit. Brothers. And it is a rotten racket we inherit. Allow me to present my definition: Poetry is the attempt to utter something true in the most direct and enlightening manner possible. Language is a tide pool whore, driven and inconsistent by a moon of another gravity. Truth is sand through a familiar man's fingertips. It's a peculiarly distilled swill, there is no constant or exclusive truth-- but without the belief, it cannot be good. And there is much bad and dishonest/ignorant in Poetry. Their dynamics flatly monotone, they become cursed with ironic webs tangled so thick that only a paid lifestyle coach could pretend to care. 

I believe we thirst for good poetry, yet the the cost of the bad cuts too dear. The nerve lies too close to things important. All my words are spent generally toward one specific-- but poetry is nothing absolute, the particular facet I am praising is merely one aspect of many.

Poetry is something unjustly neglected and discharged. Dangerous, but any attempt toward purity is a celebration. And so I praise the beginning of something new. Let it be done and met with self-possession, with a dutiful wit and a flexible spirit. May verse flow.

New things are coming fast.