Convergence of some things that have been on my mind regarding poetry, spirituality, and the Transcendentalists:
Lecture to reading poets:
Ok, I want to talk to the poets for a minute.
The rest of you, feel free to go outside and smoke, get a cup of coffee,
whatever.
Ok, poets? Come on up here. We gotta talk.
Look, guys, I've been reading some Emerson and Whitman lately. You heard these guys talk about poetry?
Ralph Waldo talks about how the birth of a poet is the principal event in history,
and how our job is to hold people steady to a truth until they can make it their own.
And Uncle Walt, why, he says that we'll kick out the priests, that a new breed of poets will be the
"interpreters of men and women and of all events and things."
Wow! But...
We're letting them down, man.
We're letting the world down.
Up here in this tiny room, closed off, talking to each other and maybe a few friends we managed to drag along
preaching to the choir in this poetry church
(look, we even built a little lecturn pulpit up here, facing pews of
folding chairs)
a mutual artistic mastrubation admiration society
speaking in unintelligable metaphor, obscure imagery
published in volumes nobody reads
incomprehensible but it doesn't matter anyway
because we're not saying anything
You! Give me some truth. Don't give me some love poem about somebody's eyes or hair -
tell me, tell everybody, how to make love to the universe incarnated in your lover
and You! Don't drop names, some obscure literary reference that shows how smart you are, that makes your poem a puzzle to solve -
open up that window, and whisper simple truths that will make the world fall stunned silent to hear
I don't want to hear another word
unless it sets my bones on fire
I'll have no more of poetry
unless it makes me want to scream in cosmic orgasm
yeah, give me poetry that fucks my brain good
that makes me ejaculate my very soul, splatter it out into the world
that thrusts truth into me so deep I can never get rid of it
we must give the world the brutal and primal
quiet lovingkindness wisdom it so badly needs
then, only then,
may we call ourselves poets
ok, get to it