Drunken Poetic Manifesto

You don’t have to be drunk to write a manifesto, but it does carry a cliché to its extreme. 

There are no poets, and yet there are no poems.  These are identifiers.  We separate our words and identify them, prose or poetry, business or screenplay.  How many poets have a list of titles next to their name on their business cards?  Only the Poet Laureate may not.  So what about the man or woman who spends his life writing what we would call poetry?  What is it they write?  Surrealists may say they write the lobster.  Dadaists may repeat poetry till it means nothing.  Romantics may say it is clarity of the transcendental.  These all may be well and good, and they are tools to write with.  But writing IS writing.  If it has a turn of phrase or an image or abstract coined phrase, then we can look at the lines going down the page, left-indented and say, this must be poetry.  This must be what I grasp at to be poetry.

And now that there is no poet and no poem; we can say there is no author of a work.  He is the mystery.  Who the hell was Basho?  He wrote the Narrow Road to the Interior, but Who was Basho?  If these words ever make it past my life, they will ask, who was drunk and poetic in his manifesto?  Jackie Chan?

I’m going insane.  I am the “in” of sane.  I walk clumsily to the door and there is an outside world.  Do I fit in there, there where they don’t know who Basho is, there where cinema is Sex in the City and not narrating live before a collaged film?  Though poets don’t exist, the outsider does, and often the two commingle, in a game of observation.  The observer and non-poet see a naked woman, and they see doom at the edge of the stage.  They see what only the poetic mask will write.  This is truly the poet, the mask.  Dylan Thomas wore a mask on the front of his books.  It wasn’t Dylan Thomas the guy who runs up the hills and hangs out by the docks and eats cabbage.   It is Dylan Thomas, the man who wrote I SEE THE BOYS OF SUMMER IN THEIR RUIN; LAY THE GOLD TITHINGS BARREN, SETTING NO STORE BY HARVEST; FREEZE THE SOILS.  This is the man I want to call my poet and those words my poem.  But they are like Frost’s middle of the woods.  The horse thinks its queer that the man stops.  He has miles to go before he sleeps.  That’s the mask of Frost, not the real human being, who widowed and outlived countless children.

A biography can tell so much about the poetic mask.  It is what we really are interpreting.  When Ginsberg sees the greatest minds of his generation, who do we imagine?  You name it.  But that’s Ginsberg’s mask seeing things.

I tell you there are no poems, because there are only passages of poetics.  They have a shape we identify, with a poet’s mask we may know.

 

A Bird came down the Walk— He did not know I saw— He bit an Angleworm in halves And ate the fellow, raw, And then he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass— And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass— He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all around— They looked like frightened Beads, I thought— He stirred his Velvet Head Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home— Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam— Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon Leap, plashless as they swim.

This is Emily Dickinson’s poetic passage.  It is marked by quatrains and dashes.  And how closely her mask is to the passage is about as important as you want to make it.  For example, you may say, aha, there is an “I” here.  That is and was never Emily Dickinson, even if she herself offered the crumb itself.  It is the mask of Dickinson, layered in the quatrain lines.  In the multi-layers of lines, the mask can mirror, at times, the reader.  This is why god-too-many say that poetry is subjective.

When someone tells me, poetry is subjective, I poeticize my mask, and say, it is what it is, as they say.  This used to be my manifesto, standing like David as it is, interpreting nothing.  However, the problem with this is, is that any reader who reads anything needs to interpret it for themselves.  If I say, really Emily Dickinson is talking about the existential gloom of the ocean and bird and this isn’t in harmony with someone else’s interpretation, we are in Subjectiveville.  And I’m not going to argue that there’s an Objectiveville we should learn from.  Nothing is worse than a poem inspiring you all your life, and then finding out that it was written as a joke.

The Poet’s Mask has no control over the Poetic’s Effect.  However, he or she has power over the poetic passage.

Poets out there, next time you take off your mask and sit on the toilet or search the refridge for pickles, know your mask is different.  It scalds your face.  It writes from its armor.  It is not you.  You are your mother’s daughter or son, and they’ll fear your next flight out of the USA.