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.