Poetry Manifesto

I wrote this for class, but I rather like it:
I write things people call poems, first and foremost, out of pure selfish pleasure. And if I didn't know better its likely every line I trailed out would be self-indulgent dreck. Sketches of drug intoxication, or sex, or the time I nearly punched a cop. The impetus, the Neanderthalian urge underneath the artifice and my naive attempts at happiness is the rambling vexation that emerges as I emerge from sleep. I write a lot of things: stories, terse e-mails, technical memorandums that people half read and nod at, invectives toward the government, text messages that mean two or more things. But poetry is how I think in the wee hours bookending my day, and for some squashed 15 minutes throughout when I'm left to my own devices. Often spontaneous, I keep whatever has surprised me and stilled my world for its instant.

And yet the flawed intellectual in me disallows meandering. It scoffs at mere spontaneity spilled out for its own sake. After all the dreams have been distilled, and the swarms of context and image have been wrangled; it all has to mean something. Every time I write a word there's a twinge of pressure and futility. The burden and anonymity of millenia stretched out behind us like entrails from a mortal wound. And yet profundity and enlightenment is no genre, see we've got our Buddhas and our Christs for that. And a poem need not solve world hunger or clothe orphans. It is momentary relief for instinctual anguish, its a lozenge or catalyst with which to understand the simultaneous pain and joy of existence. Poetry is the contradiction of pragmatism and idealism, balanced delicately on the tips of our tongue.

Our language; English, Hindi, the whole mess, utterly fails to explain the unseen 7/10s. It's mere woodblocks of archaic things arranged just so, names for animals and afflictions that hold no weight when unmatched by experience. And poetry is the attempt to convey experience, in the broadest sense. It's an attempt to illuminate the notochord.

This language, kept in tidy, grammar-school boxes, is our Rosetta Stone for the minds of our brethren. Without the placeholders of individual words our meagre understanding of each other would grind to a halt. They are our units of cultural memory, and they have only agricultural as rivals for our most important innovation. They carry us thru life, these words, and yet each one is merely a symbol briefly representing some minuscule component of this ever-changing reality.

But the experience of life demands more than words floating in the ether. Movements of the mind that go unexplained, joyful frustration at the virtually intangible; these things demand new symbols and their complexity requires towering new assemblages of those same grunts and moans we murdered our way out of the caves with. They are all we have.

And just as any Webster entry means some idea or observation, so does Naked Lunch and hip-hop and Zarathustra. Some things in the human experience are so complex, so subtle in their relevance and so difficult to elucidate that we must write Finnegan's Wake, Some require a single sentence with only the most tenuous relationship. Some require us to scream from our rooftops. Poetry, not merely our codec for the submerged, is also our means for communicating the uncommunicable.

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Honesty, Hormones, Humanity

Over cold black coffee,
I learned to talk less.
Learned to pace floors in warpath.
And how to pass polygraphs.
A shoe with a thumbtack.

By apathy newscast,
I'm servile as a eunuch,
A tendril of raw wonder,
smashed before I knew it

There is a reasonable debate, in my mind, over the necessity of truth in writing. I am of the belief that, for the sake of the art, any fabrication is acceptable. That is, I never learned to pass a polygraph, however as a metaphor this statement fits some calloused groove of how I've felt about life over the past few years. I've learned to lie for the sake of personal freedom or in defiance of authority. It's a declaration that I find it acceptable to lie to the institutions that loom large over our lives.

My life has been interesting, I don't know if it would inspire good film as of yet; but as a writer I see moments where it might have been more conspicuous, more meaningful. Hypotheticals that may have revealed a greater truth about the microverse we inhabit, possibilities riding the coat-tails of actual events that speak more succintly about what the event really meant. Chronological manipulation that says more about the architecture of my experience than a strict, wholly factual diagram ever could. And think of life, is it merely the events that mattered? Or the what-ifs, the possibilities, the longing for unlikely returns and separations, the way a dream trickled into consciousness until it became the lens you viewed life through. Truth, cold empirical facts, have their value in the sciences, in politics, in the courtroom; and it is here where anything else represents corruption. But in trying to transcribe the caterwauling human experience into a single tome, or a few lines of verse, the "truth" is far less important than commitment to reality. I make things up when I write, but in an effort to pull back the curtain further. And never to conceal. That being said, an attempt to glean a factual understanding of the events in my life via this blog or online writings may prove futile. And in fact, I'm considering a partitioning of my online posts between this and myspace. The former for topical and "artistic" endeavors or musings, the latter for personalized ("true") accounts . Of course, these buckets may not be clear-cut and I won't be scratching my chin thinking how I can fulfill some obligation that I haven't outlined in black marker.

Keep it real out there.

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The Funniest Thing that's happened all year . . .

It's got to be tough to live a lie. Spending any brief moment of inactivity sweating over indiscretions, bartering with the almighty to keep your hideous secret to yourself. In every public gesture knowing full well that your artifice is a sham.


Ted Haggard, champion of Evangelism, pariah of born-agains, Creationists, political activist and ally of the pious and moral (I can't say that with a straight face) president, is a gay man who has struggled with his sexual identity and impulses for all of his adult life. He also may have a drug problem. I know gay people and I know drug addicts; the former having no adjective that fits them all and the latter being a pitiable sort. A reasonable person, especially one who's life is devoted to forgiveness, should see nothing wrong with homosexuality and at worst extend a helping hand to the drug addict. Haggard, on the other hand, has been stamping his brand of moral rectitude all over our culture with a self-hatred that he could seemingly only extinguish be distributing amongst others like him. While not the most hard-line homophobe in charge of a church, he held office with the National Association of Evangelicals (a body representing the tilted ideology that favors legislation like the marriage amendment), he lobbied against gay rights, he belittled Richard Dawkins for arrogance. Think of that, a hypocritical, irrational preacher with political influence and a history of secret homosexual rendezvous with prostitutes telling a man of science that he is arrogant.
As a human being, Haggard deserves our sympathies during this difficult time. However, as an idea (and a man who heads a mega-church and presided over an organization representing millions is more an idea than a man) he needs to be exposed and ridiculed. Not for being a gay man and not for being a drug addict. But for being an asshole who hates himself so much that he won't be satisfied until you hate yourself. For dragging our culture further into confusion and denial. For working in direct opposition to the forces that could have liberated him from his life of fear.

Moreso than the event itself, I'm piqued by what this all means for religion. Obviously it says little about the truth or implausibility of religion; but what does it say about our culture of religion. What are we, rational thinkers and people trying to do our best, to make of posturing, self-important "prophets" when it is learned that they are in fact their own worst enemy?

My impression of these events reinforces what I already thought. The puritanical religious tendency (that is, the impulse to push one's morality onto others) is bred in fear. Fear of oneself and the misplaced reaction toward the masses. What's most perplexing and troubling about these revelations, these particular ones and those uncovered in the past, is that Ted Haggard is still sticking to his guns. Homosexuality is still "wrong" to him, and he refers to the mess as a deep, dark sin. I disagree. The "sin" is that we live in a society, perpetuated by cowards like Ted Haggard, in which we have to hate ourselves for being ourselves.

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