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Parent Issue
Month
November
Year
1995
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Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
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Agenda Publications
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ArWUlf On Poet i CS (part three of three) Gertrude Stein said: 'You can only say what you know and you can only say what you know in the way you know how to say it Maybe nobody will be interested. Ifso, too bad." Blood red seeds of pomegranate on a bronze and silver platter. Persephone's food of the dead. Deep autumn, changes undeniable Fruit under fallen leaves lays against the earth, seeds within. Soon to go underground, beneath for the winter, to rest with the ancestors, in soil which is all who've come before. A nourishing of the roots. Days grow short, dew tums to frost. Bears hibernate. Persephone was never a rape victim. Patriarchy changed the myths to accomodate the deeds being done. As for Demeter's daughter, this was no abduction, but rather a voluntary subduction. Persephone ready and willing to face the dark. To accept the death curve of the life cycle, as we accept our own digestión and elimination cycles. Submerge and contémplate. Later to show us the mystery of bulbs greening up through spring mud. Flower to fruit to seed to compost, the silent music of perpetual humus. The maiden returns, darker and wiser, now Queen of the Dead, calmly escorted by the hounds of Hekate. These are personified metaphors for reality. Women's wisdom, the most ancient and true wisdom, has taught me to face the world as it really is. There's no denying or avoiding change. It is our only constant. And, like the music of Thelonious Monk, if you want to play you got to learn the changes. Stepping forward, one is made to consider all the steps previously stepped All debts must be acknowledged and settled. One is responsible for one's actions. We cannot pretend that we are separate. Amiri Baraka says: "There is no life or culture, no art or philosophy separated from the whole expression of human life and being on the planet It is the separation that is the f irst strand of barbed wire for the fences at Auschwitz, the more modern versions of southern plantations ' Audre Lorde, quoted in Mary K. DeShazer's A Poetics oj Resistance - Women writing inEl Salvador, South África and the United States, says: "Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, fïrst made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. ' We in our comfortable society need to consult the written expression of people living in the most challenging of circumstances. A Reality Check is in order at his point, and in this setting, lest we completely lose our grounding. There's not much that 's more important than the truth. Langston Hughes wrote this in 1925: "It is we who are liars: the pretenders-to-be who are not, and the pretenders-not-to-be who are. It is we who use words as screens for thoughts and weave dark garments to cover the naked body of the too white truth. It is we with the civilized souls who are liars. " Has the situation improved? Honestly, now. l've often said that getting up in the morning is a political act. (Joe Tiboni's response: "As opposed to getting up in the afternoon?") Angela Y. Davis, who continúes to make an awful lot of sense, says: "Politics do not stand in polar opposition to our lives. Whether we desire it or not, they permeate our existence, insinuating themselves into the most private spaces of our lives." Everyone is connected to everything. Barbara Mor, who wrote The Great Cosmk Mother, (which 1 still say is the one essential text if we are to understand the world as it really is) , wri tes: "Profit is alwaysat the expense of the whole world. The 'isolated individual' does not exist. 'Personal profit' is an illusion of imbalance, and all rebalancing involves massive repercussion The Western biblical-Capitalist world's individualistic denial of the interconnected webwork of all existence has not, could never, make that webwork nonexistent - it has only made its global reality increasingly painful." As a poet 1 feel strongly enough about these statements to have included them in this bit of writing. For all of the introspection which comes with poetic development, real poetry comes of surefooted awareness and clarity, rooted in the real world, and utterly connected with that world in its entirety. Otherwise you're lying to yourself which means you're lying to the whole world right then. Gertrude Stein said: "You can only say what you know and you can only say what you know in the way you know how to say it. Maybe nobody will be interested. If so, too bad ." William Carlos Williams taught us to write according to the real picture of the real world. Without getting tangled in formulaic rubbish, in mindless metaphor. I believe that we have gotten out from under the misuse of metaphor, and thus we are able at this point to rediscover the ancient power of metaphor. It is a treasure, lo be used carefully, as a tooi for naming without distraction, which is the bottom line. Rocks are rocks, milk is milk, and oppression is oppression. Read Pablo Neruda's Memoirs, and his Canto General, then we can talk about poetics. Read how he received his deepest blessing when a man who worked in the nitrate mines of Chile told him do not know how to read, bul l know your poems by heart. 1 was involved in a show at the Performance Network a few years ago, called Kill The Poets, named after a poetry club in Chicago. I hated the name and even impersonated Neruda onstage, sittingat a table heaped with nuts and fruits, complaining out loud about such reckless use of the word Maybe I wouldn'l have minded it so badly had so many of my favorite poets not been killed. Check out how Neruda's poetry changed when the Falangist fascists murdered Federico Garcia Lorca and raped the nation of Spain in 1936. As for Ann Arbor, I've always wanted to thank the people who started up the poetry readings at the Del Rio immediately after that stageshow. They called these readings Feed The Poets, which shows they were paying attention to the power of words. Among my dearest héroes stands Anthony Braxton, who has taken the artform of creatively improvised music to ever-higher, ever-deeper levéis of imaginative clarity. Anthony says: i believe that with correct information and an understanding of respect for humanity, human beings can rise to their potential. But fixed and open variables, with the fixed variables functioning from fundamental valué systems - that's what freedom means to me." Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blythe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; 1 am nothing, 1 see all; the currents of the universal being circuíate through me." William Carlos Williams, in The Deserl Music: "And 1 could not help thinking of the wonders of the brain that hears thal music and of our skill sometimes to record it." The music of planet earth; we are blessed to be here. May we please begin to act accordingly? These are some of the guiding voices whose visión has helped me to develop as a poet I must add the insight of Lindsay Forbes: animáis are essentially our ancestors, and we cannot separate ourselves from them. We are here to care for the planet; flora, fauna, limestone and aurora borealis. lf only we can cultívate a real respect for the real world, and be respectful enough to say so in no uncertain terms, then perhaps we deserve to endure.

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