So. I believe in a lot of things. I believe in a really old school God, with sin and grace and all that. I believe in my family. I believe in my legs' ability to do anything I tell them to do, thirteen miles or two thousand meters. And I believe in poetry.
Look. I know there's hella feelings out there, and that people go through bad shit, but I believe that if you really want to say anything, you and your poetry have got to juggle two balls at a minimum (and I'm not even sure that's called juggling, I think it's called throwing two balls in the air). You've got to do beautiful, and you've got to do angry. Personal and wondering. Erotic and political.
Poetry exists to do something. Poetry shouldn't exist to befuddle or show off. If you haven't made your reader more alive by the end of the poem, fail on you. And poetry exists in community. No one I've met writes so well that there's nothing you can critique. No poem is sancrosanct.
These poems don't exist as a chapbook. If you really want one, let me know and I will make you some sweet sweet chapbook magic. But you've gotta let me know. I'm not detached enough to hand off my poetry to people who may or may not care and I don't think I'm hot enough shit that everyone should care about what I write. And, if I handed you a chapbook, there's no real way for you to tell me "hey, that verse makes as much sense as whale jewelry" or " that line makes me wish my mother was here." I write best for and with others.
So. This is a collection of poems around the idea of epidemics. Most of them are centered around real diseases, real biological things that happened. But when you are talking about epidemics, you have to look at the social aspect of them, and how all things connect, and interact.
So.
"At the beginning of a plague, and at the end, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not been yet lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth- in other words, to silence."
Albert Camus, The Plague, Part 2, pg.116
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"Those for whom certain words have meaning, and certain modes of being, those who are precise, those for whom emotions can be classified and who quibble over some point in their hilarious classifications, those who still believe in 'terms'...
ReplyDelete--These are the worst pigs of all.
You are quite unnecessary young man!
No I am thinking of bearded critics.
And I have already told you: no works, no
no language, no words, no mind, nothing.
Nothing, but a fine Nerve Meter.
A kind of incomprehensible stopping place in the mind, right in the middle of everything."
Antonin Artaud "The Nerve Meter"
"For you know that we poets cannot walk in the way of beauty without Eros as our companion. We may be heroes after a fashion, disciplined, warriors of our craft, yet we are all like women, for we exult in passion, and love is still our desire--our craving and our shame. And from this you will perceive that we poets can never be wise nor worthy citizens. We must needs be wanton, must needs roam at large in the realm of feeling."
Thomas Mann (paraphrasing Plato emulating Socrates) "Death in Venice"