Views constantly subject to change

Probably of no use to anyone

Just my own vein thoughts on why I write poetry

 

• “A poem can be anything”, William Carlos Williams 
   

• Johnny Rotten made a butter ad. Circular reasoning, punk and rebellion. The ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for “should”, mainly because it is moralising, it carries a moral imperative. If poetry cannot break it’s own rules it stagnates. NO SHOULDS, only shudders. These thoughts should be discounted. 
   

• Attempt at Universality. Fundamental links to anti-capitalism, Alain Badiou if we understand ‘communism’ closely in its primary sense: the concern for what is common to all. A tense, paradoxical, violent love of life in common; the desire that what ought to be common and accessible to all should not be appropriated by the servants of Capital. The poetic desire that the things of life would be like the sky and the earth, like the water of the oceans and the brush res on a summer night – that is to say, would belong by right to the whole world. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2871-the-age-of-the-poets-poetry-and-communism
   

• Realism & Dogme 95. A question of authenticity. A poet should only wear their own words.
   

• Solidarity. Every poets owes it to another to understand the others project. Even if it differs from their own.
   

• A violin holds every note ever played upon it. Consider Henri Lefebvre, that poetry can be a critique of everyday life and poetry as activism. The right to the city (and our right to poetry) is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. 
   

• Spontaneous affinity with quantum physics. “There is nothing, I mean it quite literally”, Slavoj Žižek. How do things emerge? The universe is a void, but a positively charged one. Particular things appear when the balance of them is disturbed. “What we call creation is a cosmic imbalance”… “things exist by mistake” Poets must assume the mistake and go to the end.
   

• A tree is a tree is a tree. Poets must engage in a language after Ferdinand de Saussure. Cannot disregard modern linguistics and semiotics. The sign and signifier, the internal structures within language and acoustic resonance. But can be ever in a sense of play.

 

           And the signifieds butt heads

           With the signifiers

           And we all fall down slack-jawed

           To marvel at words!

           When across the sky sheet 

           The Impossible birds

           In a steady illiterate movement homewards

 

                     - Joanna Newsom, This Side of the Blue

 

• From the self but self-less. Practice of empathy and a displacement of the self. Poetry can be an attempt to bridge the solipsistic divide and reaches for the ‘other’. The poet/authors words are read in your mind in your voice. Internal assimilation or another. 
   

• L’art pour l’art? Art for art’s sake? At best try not to romanticise the sheer act of ‘poeticising’. Meditate on Marianne Moore’s line, “Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness. ‘Ecstasy / affords /The occasion and expediency determines the form.’” Taken from George Moore. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51863/george-moore
   

• Culture and capital. Critique of culture, what is culture, is this culture? Zeitgeist or not, perhaps it can challenge a fast-food culture of instant gratification? Never use poetry as an attempt to mobilise cultural authority and for source of misrecognition and symbolic violence. Foucault uses the term 'power/knowledge' to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge. 'Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Keep this in mind.
   

• Ressentiment  ​[rəsɑ̃timɑ̃], poetry is often born from suppression and it cannot be satisfied, somewhere there is a paradoxical sense of tension and admiration.    
   

• “Poetry, I too, dislike it”. Marianne Moore started the obsessive ponderance. Climb the inner obstacles of enjoyment. Command of ruling ideologies of today is to “enjoy” to realise yourself and enjoy. Problem not how to rid ourselves of inhibitions, but problem how to get rid of the injunction to enjoy. 
   

• Who the fuck cares? Profanity and it’s usage. Read this: https://poetrying.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/fuck-kim-addonizio/
   

• Ode to joy. What does it stand for? Ode to humanity? Universal adaptability of well-known melody. Even Beethoven incorporated poetry in his ninth symphony. Never just meaning, it must function as an empty container, a vestibule, open to all possible meanings. A neutral frame with a catch. From the sublime (exclusive) to the carnival (inclusive). As soon as you clearly identify with something you are removed from it.