Let's Dash Off With Some Cheap Notes About Outsiders

I remember ponderous ponders that involved me, pondering over what it might mean to be "an outsider poet".  Since I like to write, I figured that actually going meta- within the ever-ongoing progression of my critical skills, something I used to believe was important should the goal of writing well, or catching inspiration well, or simply being well be more important than one's status.  

Status.  Rhymes with stratus.  Stratus is a cloudy, January day, unlike this January day--which is sunny and blue, but as usual, hovering under a different sort of stratus: the blue sky.  Which isn't blue at all.  The blue sky is nothing but a trick of light.  Physicists tell us that.  

So.  What is an outsider poet to do?  Live in outer space where everything is either the absolutely black void or something like an entire planet upon which to, once again, place one's poetic outlook into the context of status?  

From total blackness, 

I don't think the planet is round enough.  

See?  I'm a big

critic.  

What then is outsider art?  I remember thinking about that one hell of a long time ago.  Since I wasn't quite professional enough to recognize how to get a poem into a literary magazine (which is often far more arbitrary than many imagine, most of whom, at least those I've encountered, still rapt under the belief that the quality of a poem is all that matters), I asked myself: Is this what it means to be an outsider?  A poet who can't get his (or her) work published?  

Maybe then the predicament slipped deeper than mere literary journaling and magazines of verbal or nounish ammo.  Perhaps being an outsider has to do with one's station in life, one's stance within a much broader context.  

That, once upon a time, seemed sensible.  

Look and listen: I've long felt I'm an outsider.  I'm someone who, it seems, has not yet been allowed indoors by those who lord the indoors as if only the indoors is where competency lives.  It's not as if I've been reacting against an amorphous "them" so much as looking for a context within which to place myself.  Context does not necessarily mean a status.  It's more like one's station, one's position, a point of view, a frame of reference.  From there, we move outward to where that station, that position, that point of view and frame of reference no longer makes any practical sense either to ourselves or to anyone.  

But how to express this?  Weirdly, I decided to post at least one poem a day on Facebook.  To me, this has been a sort of play on words: our faces.  If our faces are clean and spiffy, people will like us.  And though we can't seem to get permission to come indoors, at least we can smile and show all the others who've been so uncaringly tossed to the so-called wolves at the door that, nope, what has occurred just doesn't work in a world of reasonable sanity.  

So yeah.  Post poetry as good as what appears in big journals, and then say, "See?  This is what happens when you don't let good poets in."  

What happens?  It means the externalities of one's existence in context have become a matter of statement.  See?  Isn't it nice to live in the "electronic rough"?  

Ruff!  See?  We dogged poets can still bark at the house cats.  

Besides, having lived through a very real existence where life itself has seemed an uncertain prospect, or circumstances which have amplified this common experience, the day-to-day validation that, yes, I can contribute something to a virtual society allows me to continue to grow.  

Now I'm at the point where I no longer have to parade my very best work before the eyes of my valued peers and Facebook friends.  Nope.  I can continue to express my outsider status as long as it takes to convince all the insiders that their sense of high status isn't really so high after all.  

That, then, indicates to me that, indeed, outsider poetry is not merely a political event, it is also a spiritual, and even erotic one.  

Being seen as "third person objective" by many so-called insiders--professional lawyers who intimidated me when I worked with them, powerful individuals who wouldn't bother to give a pip-squeak like me the time of day, and even countercultural mavens who, while resistant to status, nevertheless proclaim their status as somehow "superior" in many arcane and even occult ways to those who are part of a greater culture.  

I've got a friend.  Without trying to point him out as if to humiliate him, I note he seems capable of overcoming the acne that has cursed his face.  He's a lovable guy.  He's kind.  Smart.  Compassionate.  And assertive.  Like many who are sophisticated enough to express an unwillingness to simply buy-up or gulp-down the generic nature of contemporary commercialized pop and rock music, that man goes for some really obscure stuff.  To him, this is a matter of both knowledge and taste.  It's also an expression of outsider status, subjective or not.  

Those of us scarred on the inside like burn victims understand what it must seem like to be part of the ever-stereotyped "walking wounded".  Pity.  So-and-so is a such-and-such and so-and-so is always incapable of fully fitting in.  So?  What happens to a suicide victim, a sort of orphan, a person who lived with Bipolar his entire life, a person who endured nearly five full years of homelessness in a deeply unappreciative city, who then experienced the horrors of leukemia?  

Welp.  He's gonna fit right in, isn't he stoner doctors!  

I remember only months after enduring six hard months of chemotherapy, a group of poets invited me to read one (1) poem at a sort of carnival that mixed poetry, music, stand up, burlesque and even an amazing fan dancer.  As we got ready, during the dress rehearsal, I sat down on a riser.  I was by myself.  Man.  I knew I was numb.  I was having trouble relating to the world.  Across the room, poets and performers, many of whom I had acquainted to a limited extent as a member of a spoken word troupe that advertised outlaw and even beatnik status; there they all sat together.  I did sort of feel "a vibe".  Why no one crossed the room to bring me into the circle seemed to be a two-headed Janus of beast: 1) people never thought of that; 2) perhaps this was a gesture of respect.  I felt like being alone.  Yet I also felt alone.  

During the actual warehouse carnival, the fan dancer literally blew everyone's minds.  She danced like a lithe live wire, and then, to top it all off, she used weights on the tips of her bared nipples to then rapidly rotate them as if propellers.  It was actually amazingly beautiful.  

Weirdly, I'd become an acquaintance of her in a "meta-" sort of way: She was the herbalist at a Whole Foods location near me.  I'd immediately taken to her as she aided me in selecting the best vitamins to strengthen me on the road towards surviving a near-fatal brush with cancer.  I could tease her--not sexually, but as friendlies.  She liked that.  I liked that.  

She was the fan dancer.  Thus, while I sat alone at a table next to a family of friends, especially their son, once the fan dancer bounded off-stage, she crept up behind me and gave me a hug:  

I knew it was you!  How are you?  

Surprised stares from the family next to me.  I still chuckle a little.  I knew her in the context of herbalist.  They only knew her in the context of a fan dancer and risque performer.  

How to make those two fit together?  

That was a fun night.  I'd written a short poem that, at the time, seemed to me to be a breakthrough: the first time I'd been able to write in nearly one full year.  I guess my reading went OK.  It did with me.  I enjoy it when I read poetry to other people.  Even if sometimes the political or social context within which some of the poetry I read in a political and social context writ small, i.e. literary society and politics, jarred some of the more controlling and muddy-headed personalities which generate much admiration for themselves by posturing and posing.  Sometimes, though, posing can be a sincere form of commentary.  Punk and New Wave both had a great admiration for posing.  And both musical and artistic forms sort of did what I was doing: using a pose or position in order to generate an unease in context of literary society and politics.  

How did I express that to an audience of relatively uneducated people?  I said nice things about them.  After all, I'd come for community, not to relocate my station to a much higher plane of existence.  

Why that disturbed the anal personalities, those who continually point out their so-called Alpha status to anyone who will listen?  What's that supposed to be in terms of humbly allowing oneself to be subject to the greater whims of inspiration and imagination?  A military mechanic's take?  

I rebelled against that.  I really did.  The machine.  Who needs a machine bigger than a laptop computer, a printer, paper, and a nice place like this to take notes?  At least the major dude had a motorcycle.  No one could sit next to him.  Only behind him.  Psychology 101.  

That of course was a quiet rebellion.  I didn't want to harm anyone.  I simply managed to do what I always do: put it into a different context.  Because in my opinion that's what poets are here for.  We have a destructive intent in some ways in that we question the machinery.  Nothing wrong with that--unless the machinery decides to make it hard on the so-called Person of Questions.  

Right.  A person of disinterest.  That's me.  I've been a sort of outsider all my life.  I like my solitude.  I grew up relatively solitary.  Being alone is not solitary confinement to me.  I have a great deal of freedom.  We can call that an imagination, but I also know a sense of expansiveness can actually walk right through the walls around us.  Which is actually fun.  

Is that outsider status?  What's my context?  Hell if I know.  After spending a good 10 years focusing on the craft I love, 10 years of devotion to expressing and developing a deep communication with both the written word and the spaces between words and even beyond those, I find that other poets competing with me on spurious grounds is nothing but static.  But oddly, being resistant to static is often reinterpreted as static itself.  

That's when the boot heels point you to the door.  

To where?  To the outsider.  Kerouac.  He was an outsider.  He lived outdoors for stretches of time.  He wrote On The Road in a tiny shack in Mexico.  He did nothing that wasn't outside the so-called pale.  The pale.  Where does such a word issue?  It issues from a vast territory on the western edge of Czarist Russia, an area reserved for Jews.  It has nothing to do with either white space or white people.  Some people seem to think "the pale" means "paleface". 

Pity.  

What bothers me, isn't that, as an old friend once quipped, we should develop a special store called Bed, Bath & Beyond The Pale; but that we sometimes meet with nothing but resistance when we even dare to come back indoors.  What's up with that garbage?  

You resist status all your life, and then, after one has become inured to what status seekers might see as barbarism or an oddity, what do you get when you decide to come back inside?  

Barbarism.  Oddities all demanding you leave the room.   Which is crazy as in "crazed plates", all those porcelain statuettes with a big chip on the rims of their shoulders.  

Outdoors is scary to the housebound. 

But am I making a bid for power?  Or am I posturing?  Perhaps I merely speak the truth.  I do my best every single day when I post an outsider poem for the entertainment of my circle of online friends.  Sometimes I hit, other times I miss.  But I keep all the first drafts.  I save them.  I wait until they become useful.  The better poetry I keep to myself.  

So.  When is writing for the drawer nothing more than literary masturbation?  Should that be trivialized or mocked?  No, perhaps it's a matter of training, training to not be too dependent on acceptance.  After what I have been through, the alienation, the nihilism, the sense of being treated like a stupid domestic beast of burden by those with more resources than I can even imagine, I have a right to train myself to not be wounded any further by those who superficially depend on their drapes, their wingtips, their social connections.  

Being honest is unfashionable.  It always is.