Everyone's A Poet, No Thought Necessary, The Experience Is Everything

In a stunned, stoned, and stupefied galaxy far, far away, and not long enough ago, I used to attend a sort of late night social hour involving a number of "spoken word phenoms", a.k.a. people who stood on a little black stage and perpetrated abysmally bad poetry against or at anyone within earshot.  

Social game-playing, posturing, and pointless competition, ego inflation and mental dismemberment were all for sale there.  In a basement.  

The display of which I write is a smallish circle that met at one or two spoken word locations in the city.  A very smallish circle of people.  Preaching to the choir.  Not necessarily all that competent as writers, and definitely not intellectually prepared for the roles many in that circle seemed to believe were owed them. 

A tiny circle.  And very "revolutionary".  Not politically so.  I didn't see many at these readings who had much knowledge of anything remotely political other than the typical anti-rightist reactionaryism. Revolutionary?  More like, um, groovy.  Or the groove of rebelliousness.  These rebel exhibitionists march on to this day, spreading bad poetry here and yon as if the world needs more inarticulate posturing, adolescent shock value, resonantly odorous cliche value, and more of the sort of thing one'd hear in a junior high school pageant for Goths mad at their moms.  Paint it black.  

Is illiteracy cutting edge now?  Who needs literacy anyway?  Everyone's a poet, and dammit if it isn't all good.    

Month after month, year after year, basically the same people showed their faces at this reading, and as for a non-poet audience, people in the community who came simply to listen to poetry, well, for the entirety of the several years I attended the soiree, none of that phenomenon occurred at all.  Not even.  In fact, it sometimes saddened me that as the bar filled up with the business casual crowd and "high rollers" of bar culture, the moderator sometimes had to ask the drinkers to be quiet so "we can read".  Really?  What this meant, of course, is that those who did come to the bar didn't care what was happening on a stage at the back of the hall or possibly weren't even aware anything was happening at all. 

Think of this scene as a sort of Last Supper: meek disciples praying to one another in relative darkness amid profligate libertines and drunken money-slaves. 

Strange, eh?  This youngish crowd of poets, hobbyists, poetasters, poseurs, and dilettantes, so rebellious and brave, had in real time to contend with another crowd, the latter the very mentality many in the chorus of bad poetry seemed adamantly against, even if the antagonism the poets seemed to reward themselves for was just as superficial and poorly reasoned as the leisure hour monkeying around of "the Enemy" on the other end of the bar.  Oh yeah!  This was always a drama.  As people struggled sometimes to voice their words at the microphone to be heard over the party atmosphere, the few gathered poets might turn to look at the others in the bar and register a sincere glower.  Boorish bastards!  We're superior to business casual zombie people!  What was happening here?  An imaginary face-off between two disarticulate factions not really that opposed to one another even if only one side was actively in combat mode?  Unsolicited collisions with karma, the long held and somewhat mystical notion that all actions are compensated with equally opposite ones?  Or is this a sign of the times, a signal moment where mass media's much vaunted culture wars might have begun all along?  Naw.  That's way too noble for what I witnessed.  In one corner, "valiant" young cultural revolutionaries; in the opposite corner, the somnambulistic corporate crowd that seemingly is almost always out to spread unconsciousness all around the globe.  For money and attention.  

Could there have been one uniting factor for the two groups, something that would show both share some sort of mutual purpose?  That would be the cosmic unconsciousness.  Both seemed to have appeared out of nowhere to get drunk, high, and possibly laid.  And then no one can ignore the elephant in the room: the attention aspect.  What better way to glean some attention than by claiming to be in direct literary lineage with Jack Kerouac?  

Wait.  There's more.  What did Kerouac actually do?  That's easy enough to see.  Kerouac drove around or hitchhiked across America--mainly to go to parties, get wasted, and then dream up cosmic stuff to write about it.  It's easy to see why that's so attractive to some people.  The distinction offered to Kerouac may be less about what he actually did than about how he wrote about what he did.  That's a lesson it struck me some in the poetry room had yet to comprehend.  

How did all this play out in real time?  Much ado about attention seeking.  Narcissistic fruit flies  vying for attention while zombie-walking into an unmentionable future of the very same thing each month.  No change.  No shift in the world's inclinations.  Nope.  Just some people having a good time in a sort of cosplay variation of Dungeons And Dragons Meets Avatar In a Battle Of Apocalyptic Doom.  With costumes.  And a lot of this circled like vultures around the unexamined concept of the beatnik.  

It's always interesting to see a former IT production manager copping the William S. Burroughs look without any realistic show of knowledge of what Burroughs did with his life.  

And of course, plenty of fantasy about following Kerouac into bar culture dead soldier glory.  Why not?  Didn't he do something grand?  Actually, he wrote a couple of good books.  And like exponents of countercultures all across the 19th and 20th Centuries, he checked out of the mainstream and did so in a fashion that actually didn't challenge much of anything, really.  What he represented, actually, is the beginning of a tide of activity that led to an epoch he really didn't appreciate: The Sixties.  Jack Kerouac, author of "On The Road" and "The Dharma Bums", "Desolation Angels" and "Visions Of Cody".  Those in the literary world who know Kerouac was basically homeless for extended periods of time, a true derelict with an immense amount of pride in being a derelict, a man literally hep on being impoverished, dirty, lost, aimless and without any direction at all--these might find it odd to see people in nice, countercultural garb, some driving recent sports cars and motorcycles, nice bomber jackets, leather boots, all the accouterments necessary for anyone traveling to Fantasy Island, the uncensored version, all sporting alienation like a great big fashion statement.  

I suppose no one can successfully combat affectations like these.  If people want to pretend to emulate those who impress them, it's OK.  There aren't really any rules here to follow.  Yes, "On The Road" is a wonderful, creative novel.  It's always been popular among younger individuals.  Much of the stream-of-consciousness narrative is full of insight.  Beyond that?  Non-conforming has become practically an anthemic moment, a rite of passage among the youth of an America already battered by commercialized and commodified idiocy.  I may have openly scoffed at what I was seeing one night, commenting something along the line of, "These people are about as Beat as Oprah Winfrey," and no, this was not verboten according to some sort of rules or mandatory respect one must have to qualify.  One woman in that casual conversation, then, defending the "Beat" atmosphere I was calling "The Beat-Off Generation", shushed me: We are honoring the Beats.   

Oh.  

The woman's "educational" comment still puzzles me a little.  The so-called exponents of "Beat" denied a Beat movement even existed at all.  Both Kerouac and Ginsberg detached themselves from the fashion trend of "beatniks" that began appearing in the mid-1950s.  To them, "Beat" had something to do with events in a single place in a single time.  None of them have ever mentioned beginning a movement.  One New Yorker article from around 2012 indicated that it's possible Beat was about in-the-closet gay culture, something shared by Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and even Kerouac and Cassidy.  And so much in literary thought has occurred since 1957.  How does one honor the Beats with bad poetry?  By the way, outside of all this posturing and posing about Beat, I know one person in my area who comes close to being Beat.  She attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado.  She's an ex-heroin addict.  She lived in a cold water flat with no furniture.  She scraped the very bottom of the barrel--and survived.  She was beaten by life.  

Not one person attending the reading has that kind of "cred".  Most are pretty comfortable: fairly good jobs, nice automobiles, and yes, the clothes.  Always the costumes in a Great Big Masquerade that says, "Pay no attention to the poetry.  Just look at me!"  

This reading, that in 2024 is celebrating a 25-year run, began around the time a widespread car commercial showed a couple of hipsters riding the highways with a copy of On The Road swinging from the rearview mirror.   Lots of people had announced themselves as "hipsters"already, and for a while that was fun, a little quirky, but those who dreamed up this particular reading series never at all shared any of that verve or initiative.  From what I could tell, all were hangers-on, people who in the Eighties I called "fashion slaves"  This can be a problem.

Hipster is a word that, as far as I can tell, originated in the late 1940's as one of the first countercultures since World War II began to emerge.  Sure.  Certainly a smallish group of independent-minded young people in 2000 were akin to hipsterism.  But as the mentality began to spread into the wider setting, this tiny counterculture was corrupted, degenerating into nothing more than a sort of leeching onto something that had already passed the collective aspirations of a counterculture by.  

 

Imagine becoming a beatnik after being swept away by a TV commercial.  If you didn't really know who you are, and suddenly, the word, "hipster" dangled from the rear view mirror of a passing trend, would you latch onto it?  The "beat creator" didn't drop out.  He didn't quit his job or move to a cold water flat in a huge alienating city.  He wasn't beaten; he's an IT guy who likes to play with computers.  He does a hell of a lot of drugs.  

For me, someone who has seen a lot of various countercultural trends already, "hipsterism" lasted maybe 10 minutes.  Yes, I distinctly remember beginning to bridle at this hipster trend around the time I began to hear about it.  Once, in 2008, on a warmish Autumn night, a friend and I were crossing a parking lot on the way to the reading, when I saw a couple, all hipped-up, with just the right clothing, as they headed for their car.  

"Oh look.  Some hipsters", I joked.  

Then came the murmured retort from one of them, a woman: "Hipsters!  He called us hipsters!"  

Hilarious.  I definitely was not alone in scoffing at the idea of hipsterism.  

As a non-hipster, then, I'd imagine Jack Kerouac, a man who embraced a drunken version of what he decided is Buddhism, would have found this emphasis on display and ego a little off-base.  But I'm not the judge of that.  In "The Dharma Bums", the author commented a great deal about the forsaking of the ego.  I doubt Kerouac would have embraced the positive thinking movement either.  While he did find joy in his aimless squalor, he was moving against the grain of things designed to keep people productive, experiencing happiness while falling through the cracks of the mainstream expectations of the late 1940s and early 1950s, expectations that whispered about The Organization Man, and The Lonely Crowd, and thus sought something entirely outside the near-forced consent to abide by the dictates of an excessively narrow society.  

No wonder people bailed.  

So.  If the poetry at this spoken word event has always left a great deal to be desired, and if there is no actual audience for what was happening on stage, what remains?  The unexamined mind perhaps?  Sometimes, in the years I attended, it was difficult for me to determine what the hell some of the attendees thought they were doing that qualified not only as "Beat" but as poetry in any of its many forms and genres beyond just having a good time. 

 It's fine to have no sense of direction or to go in circles in an endless bout with the Hindu Maya, that endless wheel of desire, of longing, of dissatisfaction and illusion.  Not everyone, not even a plurality or majority of people, ever reach any actual point of enlightenment.  Perhaps a larger set of individuals realize how to get from that illusion and to at least act to find a destination that isn't illusory.   But this isn't any matter of value judgments, really.  Plenty of aimlessness exists almost everywhere in American society, 2024.  But one would hope that those who are brave enough to pretend to be poets on a stage would have consciousness to offer as an antidote or alternative to the general obliviousness of currents that seem deadening and which dull the mind, the soul and the heart  The proverbial gesture of stabbing at the darkness seems an appropriate descriptor here; very little enlightenment in the precincts of a dim, nightclub atmosphere complete with the "Neon God" famous in Ginsberg's "Howl".  This aimlessness didn't have much to do with the course of the actual lives of those on stage, though; no one was making a life choice; rather it involved an aimlessness in the content of their performances.   Blurriness.  Distortion.  Ineptitude. Is it "Beat" to not know what the hell you're doing with the words you're using?  This stuff wasn't so much "Beat" as naive poetry.  Which is actually a thing.  Naive art points to artistry that is uninformed by any standard or institution of art.  We see a lot of naive art, for example, in the artwork of peasants in foreign countries, and in, perhaps, the artwork of Grandma Moses and other exponents of those who are untrained artists, and who, actually, do manage to produce worthwhile art.  In contrast to that sense of the artist's relation to his or her medium, much of the behavior I found there involved a fantasy about influence: how one gimpy poetry reading can influence the greater culture.  

I'll note here a phenomenon I've recognized in myself as I write: My inner world seems to expand, sometimes becoming seemingly universalized, and my mind becomes more sensitive to immediacies, my focus is sharpened, and then, once I'm done, it's as if my private world is much bigger and far more important than it actually is.  

Sometimes, in the silence of my room, I feel almost godlike.  This illusion is an outcome of strong concentration.  Thus, especially before I caught onto the tendency and learned first-hand what it means when a poem is "hot" and thus needs to "cool", when I'd produce a poem that gratified me in such a way, I'd think  what I had managed to create was far better and more trenchant than it actually was.  Slowly, the illusion wore thin, and after letting the poem sit for a few days or weeks, I'd see through what I'd believed was nearly perfect work.  The letdown sometimes pained me. 

What happens if a poet ignores the illusion or takes it for the truth?  What if revision is what never occurs?  Then the illusion is allowed to stand.   

This illusion is common to all kinds of activities.  It's a form of perceptual inflation--ego inflation is a common example of the illusion--and I suspect this strange contradiction between the godlike illusion and the actualities of the quotidian routine befuddles even "the best minds of my generation".  

Wait.  Who are these best minds?  Do I know any of them?  How can I tell one of the best minds from one of the not-so-good minds?  Is there a way to tell?  A look, a gambler's tell, a gesture, that reveals all about the difference between the actual and the pose?  

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. . . ."

What happens to those who literally live for illusions one is one of "the best minds" but is not "destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"?  Starving, naked hysteria is scary.  Being destroyed by madness is an acquired taste.  So let's just take "the best minds" part and leave the "starving hysterical naked" out of the picture and thus go with the ego inflation and probable heroism thereof.    

Think a moment  about it.  Picture the image of someone who is starving hysterical and naked.  It'll only hurt a second.   Is that you?  When you look in the mirror is that what you see?  

The naked truth, starving for the truth, hysterical over the truth perhaps? 

But there's more.  One morning last winter, I encountered a poor madwoman splayed on a bus bench right outside of where I live.  Her ragged clothes--garish.  Her eyes--clearly horrified.  Her countenance--an absolute mess.  Raving, mumbling to herself, she started when she saw me.  She was starving, nearly naked, and clearly hysterical.  

"Here.  Here's a bus pass," I crooned.  

"I DON'T WANT NO CHARITY!"  

What could I do?  

We can all just forget about anything even remotely related to the truth inherent in poetry if the investment in living inside an illusory bubble is more important than the sacrifices, travails, difficulties and compromises a poet more often than not has to accept as he (or she) walks the borderland fences.  Why not create illusions by artificial means instead?  If one is thereby inspired hot-wire-style, and if one feels the euphoric is the singular and all-important goal in representing per superficialities the inspiration and imagination that is also a means to the end of an even more euphoric altered state, where does all that fit into a poem once the spirit of the moment fizzes out and floats away?  

Escape from reality.  Remain in grace.  Keep a steady high.  

Sometimes the letdown after the peak experience involves a rough landing.  After a subjective apotheosis, when one descends from the height of an inspiring moment, one suddenly experiences a sense of powerlessness, invisibility, that one has returned to non-entity status--at least in a reactionary comparison to who or what one was only hours or days or even weeks before.  This is like a hangover.  And yes, this comedown can generate frustrations in people who had expected to have been permanently changed by an experience with the white space of a writing pad.  Once the "grace" evaporates, there is always "the counting", the quantification, the use of reason to investigate the inspiration.  This latter part goes missing in the environment I met firsthand among people all about the experience--and the missing experience.  

The missing experience.  What happens then?  That's easy: projection.  

Exactly.  I blame you, and you and you and you.  I feel frustrated because you did something.  You oppressed me.  You attacked my identity. You're coercing me.  This nonsense isn't confined to poetry.  It's all over everywhere, and likely beyond. 

In light of illusion, then, the burst bubble, in other words, too often results in a Great Big Sounding Off Against All The Evils Of The World That Took Away The Infantile: poetry that hacks away at amorphously imagined conventions and the very institution of literature.  Whatever it was that made your euphoria leave you, you're really angry at what made it go.  You want your joy back.  When this gets discombobulated and sent through the reaction formation where one rationalizes the Lost World, the avant garde pose begins to emerge.  After all, in a projection of unconscious proportions, it's all the regular world's fault the experience went away.  The iconoclasts on stage end up battling the very institution of culture--a culture that remains to this day as a sort of ping-pong ball knocking around on the insides of  craniums.  

The yips.  

Some of this residual "suffering" strikes the pose of confessional poetry, albeit in a blurry way.   Victimhood.  Social justice warlordism.  Ethnic strife.  Most of all, the detritus of the missing experience reveals itself as a number of poorly understood iterations of the spiritual.  We could note here that in the all-American culture of superficialities, euphoria is mixed up with spirituality.  Are they identical, synonymous?  Communicating either of course is doable. But. . . does the artifact of the experience, the representation of what you brought back from Shibumi, adequately describe the experience?  If not, what then was the point of any of it?  

Who'd proscribe anyone from experimenting with the identity of "artist" or "poet"?  Experimentation is a good thing.  But many are called, and few are chosen.  When and how does the assumption of such an identity ring true, though, and when is it false or fraudulent?  This is the poseur problem.  What proceeds (or should, or even could, proceed) between the "A" of beginning to experiment and the "B" of reaching a point where poetry is more than merely a word you can say?  Isn't the artifact as a communique from the aura of the poetic experience the most important factor here?  Isn't adequately communicating that experience the essence of being a poet? 

Trying on the identity of "poet" as if it's a costume in a Great Big Masquerade Party is OK for grins.  That's like joining the Rotary Club.  Digging it deeper, the accompaniment of an ill-fitting identity with grandiloquent airs isn't nearly as pretty--or fitting--as it may seem to those doing the posing.  

Ah, it's all good.  Everyone's a poet.  And if such a "true-false" identity is exposed, the Grand Fruit Flies of Experience get rather irritable.  Unfortunately, this problem with false identities expands in a distinctly sociological way.  

Fruit flies don't like gadflies.  Isn't the social, political and cultural role of any literary artist tied up with being somewhat of a gadfly?  And as for gadflies, shouldn't they know their subject matter before vociferous bloviation?

The upshot here?  An entire local culture tries on the basically faked cultural identity--an identity that is seen as cultural--when it's either only experimenting with it or isn't quite clued into what it takes to achieve such a collective identity.  Boy, that's almost comic, really.  But look, look, look:  In the city where I live, literature isn't even a pass, a punt or a kick anywhere near a forte in terms of the local culture.  Literature, after all, requires intellect, and imagination, and a requisite supportive culture.  Many have actually seen intellectual culture first hand, and to me, a denizen of a city that practically forbids such a thing to the point that the intellectuals in town constitute a poorly-formed underground, the cultural identity pose is an amazing phenomenon to behold.  

Keep changing clothes, John Lennon once admonished.  For what reason?  For the sake of the clothes?  Or for the sake of the ironically rock-solid fact that identity is merely a construct in a reality of perpetual change.  "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, I contradict myself."  

An intellectual local culture seems to precede a literary one.  I remember visits to San Francisco, both in 1992 and in 2001.  The place was buzzing with all kinds of ideas.  In a cafe with a girlfriend, for example, I listened to a couple discuss Sartre, and from what I heard as I eavesdropped, I could tell those people knew what they were talking about.  It wasn't all display.  The look?  The clothes weren't there.  Just regular-looking and well-educated men and women using their minds.  My city's the diametric opposite of that.  In a way, this is a purposeful atrophying of what culture actually means.  

Need examples?  Paris in the 19th Century (and into the 20th) became famous for "cafe culture".  The cafes of the period were rife with all sorts of intellectual and aesthetic conversation.  In fact, "cafe society" was not only fashionable, it was a distinctly cultural phenomenon of the highest order.  Some pretty famous conversations at Parisian cafes are part of the city's cultural heritage.    But in my city, "cafe culture" tends to circle around two things: business and sports.  Very strange, too, when one local bookstore owner recently went on record in the newspaper to proclaim this city "a literary city".  It's not.  The bookstore's owner wasn't fooling anyone.  Or maybe he was.  Maybe people who aren't actually conscious believed him.  His proclamation amounts to wishful thinking: If I say this, it's absolutely true.  Even if it isn't, at least it sounds cool.  

Sometimes boosterism like that is intended to attract attention to something that isn't actually there at all.  A publicity stunt: a way to make people notice something, or to generate interest in something, or a way of mounting some kind of hopeful initiative.  The bookstore's owner, who also man a smallish independent publishing operation, boasts "kudos" in that his house had published books by a Norwegian author who won the Nobel Prize In Literature.   In translation.  Maybe because nobody else would touch it.  Until he became famous.  And then the race was on.   These Nobels, by the way, seem lately to be intentionally trying to drum up controversy by selecting people who are altogether unknown.   

Altogether unknown.  Why is that?  

Sometimes everything comes down to marketing and reactions to marketing.  The city to which I refer is a businesslike place.  It is a center of the oil industry.  The real estate development community is excessively powerful here.  The military-industrial complex is also deeply influential.  The area also boasts many large insurance, accounting, and retail companies.  Hence, "Official Culture" is all about big business.  The town is a hard-working one too.  Many lives are built around occupation, not avocation or culture.  Hence, in a coffeeshop like Starbucks, for instance, one is prone to hear all about the job, or the "entrepreneurship" of people who like to talk big about two things: their money, and shopping.  Entrepreneur.  A big word.  Sounds sophisticated.  Even if half the people who use it to describe themselves haven't the vaguest idea it describes people who take huge financial risks in shaky ventures.  Is a guy who works as an engineer for a large munitions firm an entrepreneur?  

Apparently he is an entrepreneur.  At least according to the half-educated who like to hear big words they think are describing them.  

As for the latter, there seems to be an attitude among many entranced and hypnotized by the values inherent in a business culture like that of my town's. . .that one can purchase culture.  Culture here, at least to some, usually people who pat themselves on the head about being cultured because they own some art objects; culture is more a product than an inclination.  Want to be a poet?  Dress like a poet.  Buy the clothes here.  Get a Rupi Kaur book.  Hold forth about Taylor Swift's "verbal acuity" (snicker).  Just say you're cultural.  Nobody'll notice, right?  

What is slated as the title of Taylor Swift's upcoming recording?  "The Tortured Poets Department".  Soon to be a major Hollywood blockbuster at every spoken word reading in the country.  

Everyone's culturally sophisticated.  It's all good.  

I got a little tickled once a couple of years ago when the supposedly "alternative" weekly announced the City was searching for a poet laureate to represent the city's sudden literary yen.  The "culture editor" of the alt-rag urged people to get out their little notebooks with flower stickers on them and show their frilly writing to those conducting the search.  Her attitude was demeaning to literature in general.  So I wrote the woman to state that demeaning poetry was in a very small way almost tantamount to the widespread murder of poets in Myanmar, or to the imprisonment of poets in Cuba, or in Russia.  After all, politicized contempt from official voices for independent literary voices of any stripe can result in such pogroms when the going gets even more reactionary than the official voice's culture-free weirdness.  I named a few names: Akhmatova, Milosz, Havel.  Her reaction?  More demeaning.  "You're a pedant!"  She added she was writing to her audience, not me.  

Her audience?  The community of the culturally illiterate.  People who like to laugh at poets and then go have a beer.  She could have been honest about her opinion--just as I'm being honest about mine--without the typical ad hominem of ridiculing people who may be seriously working towards becoming valued poets (worthy of poet laureate status) by comparing them to teenaged girls who are writing their saccharine thoughts in the journals they bought at Walmart.  

"You're a pedant, and I'm a boor!"  

Interestingly, when I checked out the "culture editor's" Facebook page, I found something absurdly weird: There she was, a thirtyish and pretty young lady--posing with a friend. . . while brandishing a copy of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar".  She had a wide smile on her face.  

Pay no attention to my attitude, the photo told me.  Just look at me.  

The very definition of bourgeois culture has to do with an embrace of the mere trappings of an idea.  An idea to the bourgeoisie is a thing that can be owned.  When I see displays of bourgeois culture here, or in the exhibitionistic tendency of an alt-rag's culture editor, my mind turns to Gustav Flaubert's unfinished novella about the 19th Century French bourgeoisie, "Bouvard And Pecuchet", a hilarious satire about two cultural illiterates who decide to become farmers, then artists, then literary figures, then even religious saints--all without actually being any of those.  Instead, Bouvard and Pecuchet would order books, read a little of them, and then proceed in their delusions of culture and intellect.  Of course, the two fools continue through a succession of disasters and failures.  Ironically, Flaubert, who had issues to say the least with the mere idea of basing one's identity on capital or property, died in the midst of writing this.  Kind of like the unfinished business the culturally illiterate leave behind at their wakes.  

This strange local boosterism, its trappings without substance mentality, its superficiality and shallow assessments of its Official determinations of possessing culture-as-a-thing, is rightfully and best interpreted as satire insofar as my town and its image concerns me, but it is this that is more common here than any resemblance to the actual.  Much of what is intended to be officially sanctioned culture seems to circle around big real estate projects: a big museum that cost a fortune to construct, a concert hall that cost massive sums of money, and a ballet palace, a theater center, and more big real estate deals.  But at the same time, the local symphony, to name only one cultural "accoutrement", has trouble filling its halls.  In terms of visuals, at least the local art looks nice, and of course, since art doesn't necessarily involve much mental effort to enjoy, it's passable in "Official Culture" interpretations here in a city that, seriously, is grandiloquent about itself enough to suggest to the mirror that it is really a European city lost in America.  

How to nail this point home?  Around 25 years ago, an eatery called Cafe Society sold awesome hamburgers.  I looked.  I couldn't find F. Scott Fitzgerald anywhere.  

Indeed.  F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" does hammer that nail into a good two-by-four joist that may or may not support the delusions of men who appear in local coffee shops ardently typing their novels as if they're the ever-vainglorious New Age performer named Yanni.  The brusque wave of the hair and everything. 

Wouldn't it seem more authentic for the artist or the poet to make him- or herself invisible, or at least secondary to the actual art or poem?  Making the artist's work invisible, on the coin's flip side, seems to be a matter of force or coercion in some of the more tyrannical spots on the globe.  But as William S. Burroughs observed in "The Soft Machine", American commercial culture has a tendency to both co-opt and then bury authentic culture whenever it emerges.  

Alas.  Burroughs, a Beat archetype's cut-up novel's content: A super-secret secret agent knows how to super-secretly disguise himself with "undifferentiated tissue".  

"Burn the books," the novel's detective admonishes the Mayans, "kill the priests!" 

Visual art, if it isn't fully understood in an intellectual capacity, of course, is not dangerous to the powers that be.  Only recently, though, as I read an interesting British survey of contemporary art in the 21st Century, what I read involved all kinds of concepts and commentary on commercial culture in the plastic arts.  Much of it focuses unsurprisingly on the bourgeoisie's ever-strange mentality as it eats the world into a cinder.  It's not puzzling that artists, inherently independent of those who can and often do interpose themselves between the individual and how the individual is conditioned to see society and culture, feel bruised by commercial hegemony.  "Burn the books, kill the priests!"  Hence, some art is reactionary in nature, or at least discursive, part of a vast dialogue that thoroughly escapes the ruminations of many people who only see "pretty pictures".  

But if you're not zeroed in on the meaning beneath the content of local art, you're going to not only miss the artist's intent, you're not going to see yourself or the general culture called into question.  Never mind that a major role of actual art involves criticizing or critiquing culture.  Here in my town, the oft-publicized art is a confession of that what constitutes "safe art" is to be lauded to the heavens simply because it is harmless: Yessir, we got lots and lots of cowboys and even a famous bronze facsimile of a trail drive, complete with giant-sized cattle in this-here city.  

An artist or poet is seeking meaningfulness most of all in a world that can be and possibly should be uncertain, insecure, and liable to be seen for what it is.  The difficulty presented to a poet who is serious about the use of a craft to better understand the world, its politics, its poetics, its culture, its societies, its religions, and much more, is that all of these constructs have a tendency to obfuscate what is both real and interpretable.  Why prevent this skillful ability to both perceive and represent those perceptions?  But this is what happens here all the time.  But why?  For reasons of "national security"?  Or for the sense of safety among some groups that find any criticism or critique of their attitudes, behaviors and social and political and commercial activities to be scary or "uncalled for"?

Marginalizing literature is a variation on the marginalization of the intellectuals.  Most totalitarian cultures find intellectuals insufferable. And hence they either physically eliminate them, or they find ways to silence them, sometimes via ridicule and antagonistic stereotypes.  

I suppose I could go into a commentary into how tyranny operates, and how insecure leadership often results in cultural repression.  But how insecure are these wealthy individuals and their groups?  Is art critical of commercialism or even capitalism, or product placement, or other stances designed to prickle the mind into a new awareness that frightening?  

Why is that?  

Apparently, the so-called ruling class's verdict on literature here in this woebegone, nearly culture-free city may have fully conditioned the minds of at least a few of the poets of whom I write.  Again, it's a matter of the unexamined self, the one Plato's Socrates persona asserted is not worth living.  At the very least, many of these younger poets are digging on the superficialities and shallowness of whatever it is that has managed to so condition them into nothing more or less than "the experience".   More on that later.  

The intellect, after all, actually can be dangerous to an embattled bourgeoisie culture substitute if its marketing and pretense is snapped or burst open for all to see the proverbial underbelly it seeks to hide from the unenlightened.  Insecure powers-that-be actually don't like people thinking--or talking about them.  Especially, to use a common vernacular trope, if it's "meta" and concerns them, those who take a larger view beyond quaint complacency and obliviousness are sometimes either blotted out of official culture or ignored.   Such business-oriented "cultural commanders" are, through no real virtue other than their economic cloud, the big movers and shakers out to ensure nothing comes between them and their need to dominate even the culture if they deem it necessary to either CYA or protect the bottom line known as the money.  If bourgeois culture is all about the superficial trappings that merely suggest there may be culture somewhere in one's mind--when it's summarily absent--actual or authentic culture constitutes a threat to what has become simply another little game to play.  A bourgeois mentality in turn is dangerous to actual culture, and when that facsimile of culture becomes reactionary, it is going to literally attack the authentic in a competitive bid for dominance.   

There.  A good letter to the editor.  That will likely go as far in its demand to change attitudes as a group of Frankfurt School denizens sitting in a Brentwood mansion near downtown Los Angeles and fuming about Hollywood.  

But, you know: Don't let any coherent criticism spread--lest it swallow the world eaters themselves.   

I've long wondered about this collision between actual cultural expression and the aforesaid military-industrial complex's social and informational influence in the area.  Perhaps (I have nothing to serve as evidence for this) cultural artifacts or behavior critical of the status quo are to be forced out of the official picture due to "security concerns".  In a way, that almost makes sense.  Why allow anyone to rock the boat if the status quo could be endangered, destabilized or forced into disequilibrium by people expressing themselves independently without any official sanction?  If "Official Culture" is a neutered version of authentic culture, then such developments render it ineffective and, of course, clearly identified as a superficial facsimile designed to fool, to block thought, and to condition people into various iterations of obedience.  Fraudulence is a form of societal control.  But fraudulence is also quite saleable.  Saleable?  To tourists perhaps.  Maybe tourists really like big sculptures of trail drives as the Official Culture attempts to foist "cowboy culture" onto the city's image.  

Earlier, I mentioned how the supposed "hipster" movement was fairly interesting and even valid to the degree that it was a smallish circle of individuals who, in one form or another, had checked out of the conventional culture and engaged in an alternative they themselves made in a DIY fashion--and that it quickly dispersed like gas into a phantasm of itself as it became more of a fashion statement than anything resembling original intentionality--if there was any in the first place. My impression of "hipsterism" is that it emerged in a stochastic manner, disorganized, spotty, organic and flush--fine when left alone yet also irresistible to those ready to cash-in on the next big thing.  Interestingly, as hipsterism sank under the throes of commercialization and commodification, some of these individuals began reacting against what was being done in the name of "the market".  Those people I know in Portland, 2024, for example, are politicized and resistant today.  But everyone is still having fun coloring outside the lines.  

Needless to say, however, this is not true in this town lost in the Sunbelt, one rife with an official brand of reactionaryism.  Outside influences like, say, the United States government, are frowned upon.  The local TV news is fraught with veiled attacks on Washington, the government, politicians and anything remotely associated with any of those.  It may seem like ages to some, but much of the culture war that now dominates much of the day's news reporting began at or just before the spastic onset of the seminal failure called The Reagan Revolution.  Suddenly, artists were scapegoats.  Never mind that the visual arts were enjoying an international renaissance at the time.  Artists were "Marxists" and "subversives", all of them out to destroy the United States from within.  Poets?  Apparently, we were writing super-secret, metaphoric code to be read by the USSR's Politburo.  Paranoia was everywhere.  

That got an update when Georgia's Newt Gingrich took the slimy baton from Georgia's Jesse Helms and managed to so cut National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities funding that independent voices, dangerous to this strange regime, were tossed out as castaways.  I remember feeling more than a little bruised when first Helms and then Gingrich tossed off the nonsense that artists and literary figures in America were somehow communist sympathizers who had no right to receive funding from the federal government.  I knew some awfully good artists who also had to work at eight-hour jobs simply to keep roofs over their heads.  What took their place?  

The idea Helms, Reagan and Gingrich espoused is that artists needed to rely on "the market" for their bread and butter.  Thus, satisfying "the market" by supplying what "the market" demanded was the only means to the end of financial survival offered to American artists and literary figures.  This supposedly was "money better spent".  But spent on what?  Of course.  Tax cuts.  Shrinking government.  Downsizing.  Cutting the poor off at the knees.  In a word?  More crass commercialism and commodification in "Official America".  Why?  Why was it that suddenly, as a "new regime" began its push for political, ideological and economic dominance while scapegoating Liberals, Progressives and anyone else who "refuses to behave", the artists were to be held as the sole responsible parties for the degeneration of the country?  Because it is the nature of the independent artist or writer to rock the boat. That's what art does.  And when a new regime is out to replace conventional wisdom, anyone who rocks the boat must be excluded, excised and tossed into the maw of "the market".  

Strange that a Hollywood actor would declare outright jihad against "Hollywood" and the arts.  Anything for the market ideology he preached--as if deregulatory anarchy was the route to American renewal.  If the arts, artists, intellectuals, public spirited individuals, resisted the Reagan Revolution, then defund them.  Make them obey "the market".  All for rocking the boat.  

Rocking the boat.  Anyone halfway familiar with the current "conservative" zeitgeist of 2024 knows that this reactionary faction of capitalists who have co-opted the word "conservatism" to gain some kind of credibility in its wish to have people assume these folks are protecting tradition; they know all the guff about "socialism!" that spreads like a bad smell on the airwaves and in print these days.  Apparently, the Sixties, a time when younger people refused to go fight for the very same (usually quite wealthy) people in a distant jungle, was a scary time for those who desire to dominate everything that moves, and much of that which can't.  This "nightmare" is recalled quite often in "conservative" media circles and silos.  

Pump your fist, yell "up the system!" and get a reaction that lasts nearly 60 years.  And yet the same propagandists are prone to call "leftists" a strange epithet: snowflakes.  

Is anyone who critiques the general drift of American culture a "socialist"?  Apparently so--at least among one of the stranger, more paranoid factions in American society.  This form of attack should be familiar: It's typical rightist scapegoating.  What's at stake is the right's fears, not anyone's actual threats.  Spreading that kind of fear--that anyone they're against is "commie"--is one way to be a reactionary that cannot actually do anything unless the scapegoat forces one into a move out of status quo passivity and complaisance.  

But I'm whining again.  As well as pointing to some of the reasons for the supposed "Outlaw" outrage against "the academy".  Most of those reasons aren't actually reasoned through by those who parrot them.  Remember.  Reason isn't the point.  Nor is political knowledgeability.  Everyone's a poet.  That's the big point here.  You don't even have to think to get onto the TV set.  Don't pay attention to my attitude, just look at me.  

More on this after the commercial from your sponsors.  

Wait.  Isn't this type of obliviousness almost everywhere, and in many different iterations of what we call American society and culture?  I found myself one day actually smiling at this probability.  America has long been almost famous in Europe for this contradiction.  A few months ago as I read Saul Bellow's  "Herzog", the story of a man having a nervous breakdown, in part due to a divorce with a woman who, Bellow alludes, has embraced mass culture, and also due to the fact he and his intellectual status was beset by all kinds of meaninglessness and idiocy has he himself tried to negotiate himself through mass culture.  Dwight MacDonald, whose book, "Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against The American Grain", remains controversial since its first essays began appearing in the 1950's, wrote about this problem at approximately as Bellow's work.  Sometimes the idea of mass culture is embraced by Liberals; others by conservatives.  Most agree America is a harsh wilderness for the intellectual.  

Two and a half decades ago, a vibrant local countercultural zeitgeist had developed in the city.  The art scene became admirable.  Interesting.  And the music scene, mainly hard core punk, took off to the point that Spin Magazine declared the town to be a better alternative music center than either Austin or Seattle.  But it was short-lived.  As soon as property developers got wind of this organically grown culture, they began raising the rent, pushing out the local culture, and then cashing in, determined to turn the entire area into yet another commercialized facsimile of culture.  Meanwhile, the socialite Old Guard seemed equally determined to trademark the town as a center of a creepily superficial variation on "cowboy culture".  Our heritage.  A renaissance of the Old West as emulated by maybe the TV show Gunsmoke.  You know:  For the tourists. Tourism brings money to town, hence, the town "owns" the Old West.  Like a thing.  A nick-knack.  A bauble.  Nothing really real here, folks, just don't get too close in examining the image.  

Dowdy upper-class housewives in concho belts, Mexican peasant dresses, garish yoke blouses and little tiny cowboy hats, all to mimic the culture surrounding Santa Fe, New Mexico, used to "monitor" art openings.  Like nuns, they always seemed to have an eye out for "commies".   

I used to bait those women.  I'd tell them things like: "See that artwork over there?  It's going to topple the System!"  Of course, at the time I was almost always drunk at the art openings I attended.  

See how the reaction to cultural repression begins?  

This is your brain, a parody of the old anti-drug PSA goes, This is your brain on the System.  Just say no.  

Certainly, scapegoating idiocy probably happens all over the United States, but here in the South the paranoia is so thick even a sharp knife won't cut through it all.  Once a neighborhood becomes popular or counterculturally noteworthy, here come the atrophied souls hellbent on money, ready to turn the place into a miserable melange of chain restaurants and bars.  The countercultural area indeed supposedly experienced a renaissance: Chain restaurants, a 7-11, a Subway sandwich shop, and of course, a few tall office buildings.  Can't do without those big real estate projects, can we?  

What planet is this anyway?  

For a song, so to speak, the greedy goobers and world-gobblers who like locusts have descended on cities on the verge of bankruptcy due to serious financial issues brought about during the Reagan Revolution in my city brought down the local culture like a renegade bronco, blood and foam pouring from its nostrils into the dust of yet another real estate development--and turned the entire area into the kind of urban wasteland just ready for the big shiny glass boxes known as officing opportunities.  What better way to gesture to anyone who looks for culture that what is supposed to be a culture is nothing but smoke and mirrors?  

I'm reminded of the Ptomkin Village, an artificial town set up on the Ukrainian steppes in order to show Czarina Catherine The Great that "progress is at hand".  Surely she looked into the distance from the luxury of her coach and saw that, indeed, Russia was modernizing and becoming a certain wonder.  Beneath the surface, there was nothing but props that seemed to call to mind this essay-familiar bugaboo called bourgeois culture, an approximation or facsimile of something that isn't really there at all.  Or it's the famously hilarious scene from the satiric Mel Brooks classic, Blazing Saddles: a fake western town that blows over when the wind picks up.  Apparently the con artistry of supplying only the surface as a stand-in for actual culture is an important tactic in protecting the big money interests.  And makes for good absurd comedy too.  

What strains the imagination is how the commercializers not only see the real culture as a threat to its existence but how it works to co-opt it into a means to the end of making money.  This is a common instrumentalization, one in which what is known in some quarters as use value is supplanted by exchange value.  The proverbial "good" is turned into "good to eat, good to wear, good to drive, good to put in your home".  

Caught in the amber of a commercialized culture, we often bide our time as subjects of our own trappings, our stuff, our cars, our houses, our clothes, our style, our marketable outlook, our financial success.  Going only that far is stopping short of a big reason culture even exists: What is our free time all about?   Television?  A restaurant?  Snacks?  The mall?  Look: Gaining necessary depth in culture is sometimes harder work than anyone has the time to do.  The concept of The Age Of Anxiety hinges on a dysfunctional use of one's free time.  One can't help but wonder what all that work, all that money-making, all that productivity is for; yet even that is sometimes more difficult to plumb than to ignore.  Of course, cooperating with a nationwide bid to become more commercially productive, many employees and professionals are virtually exhausted after working all day.  But where is productivity allowing us to go?  What is its overriding value, its goal?  

We really could ask ourselves, Where in the hell are we going with this?  And we all intuit something is very wrong with the picture we're being told is us.  Of course such questions open all kinds of doors.  Some offer lousy choices.  

Out with the good, in with the bad.  This commercialization of a country is the polar opposite of authentic culture.  Superficiality.  The mass market.  An "endangered bourgeoisie" in dire need of conquest-as-self-protection.  The old saw about the one thing that cannot be criticized is the one thing that literally controls you seems to bear upon these observations.  Here in a relatively ignorant Sunbelt city, anything critical of all-important commerce is branded.  

"Burn all the books, kill all the priests!"

I have one excellent example.  Earlier, I wrote about the City's quest for a poet laureate to represent the City.  Once the search ended, we learned a slam poet, a really good one, had earned the spot.  But he isn't a poet at all.  Not to demean the man; it should be clear he's an excellent performer.  He doesn't have too much on the ball, though, regarding the kind of poetry most consider when they think of a poem.  Almost immediately, he visited the poetry reading I'm examining and told the audience he was against "that academic poetry".  Good for him.  Later, when he was breathlessly interviewed by the local public radio station, he completely misdefined "white space", suggesting it is "the stuff that is in the margins of a poem".  

Now, he's got a book, published by the local publication house I wrote about earlier, titled "Occupy Whiteness".  He's a Latino.  He's made some crass statements about white people and appears in photographs in a serape and sombrero.  No biggie.  To each his own.  But more to the point, he's actively in pursuit of commercial acceptance.  He's thrilled the business community mainly because he's not out for its collective scalp.  Yes, he's a relatively simple man who runs more on sentimentality than actual acuity.  Thus, he's the darling of the Rotary Club.  He received a $50,000 grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation that is specifically steered to poet laureates nationwide.  No matter.  The guy's kind of rebellious--while at the same time being under the supportive influences of some of the biggest rightists in the entire area.  

That's practically the definition of what worries me about poets and artists who don't really understand the political and ideological dimensions of what they are writing or speaking or abiding.  He's come out in favor of commercial forces, advertises on his Facebook page that he's purchased this or that, a huge HDTV, a Matisse print, furniture, etc. He then got exercised over the movie "Avatar" because the movie "was definitely about Native Peoples" but didn't openly advocate "justice" for them.  I remember commenting, "But it's just a movie."  Oh well.  Read a book, right?  

As a performer, he's truly phenomenal.  Performative.  

See how these dynamics play into the spoken word "poetry scene" of which I write?  I know that for a few years, I attended an atrophied excuse for poetry reading mainly for a sense of community.  Since I've long been a writer, a poet published in a number of fairly respectable journals and magazines, it seemed almost rewarding to share my interest with somewhat likeminded individuals.  Of course, this wasn't the last house on the block; it was practically the only house on the block.  My idea in going to the reading involved listening and then sharing my contribution, and most of all, some socializing.  It wasn't much.  I enjoyed talking to some of the people in that tiny circle.  I definitely wasn't attending simply to be fulfilled or given a grand experience.  

But the experience is everything.  Even when it isn't.  

To be honest, not all the poetry at the gathering of at the very most 20 people on a very good night qualified as bad poetry.  There were also other genres: so bad it's good poetry, so full of confusion poetry, and actually, some fairly decent poetry.  Most of it had been hammered out by beginners, especially by people who literally (no joke) had no literary background at all, and nearly all the spoken verse might have shown some promise had the interest in pursuing the hard work of developing a communication with the written word, a thing that really isn't easy at all, had entered the heads of some of the people who regularly attended the gig.  

But seriously.  I don't think most of those people were too lazy to investigate what poetry is or what it can mean within a greater culture.  Many did not seem to be equipped for such a pursuit.  Not that they didn't want to think their poetic careers had already come to fruition after years of, well, not really working at it at all, other than taking a few stabs at what seemed to be the inner life of people who never expected to have one.  

Fantasy Island.  Without The Plane.  

Sometimes, when I look back at that period of my life, I recall being puzzled by the anti-intellectual fervor of some of these people.  Not only were most summarily uninterested in any of poetry's intellectual dimensions (there are many), most were actually, naively, and virtually against poetry's intellectual dimensions.  The operative word, as I've mentioned half a hundred times, was obliviousness.  The entire shtick seemed to circle around the experience, a feeling of redemption, uplift, a makeshift sublime, much of it the effect of some pretty good dope.  

Cultural critic, Mark Greif writes in his collection, Essays Against Everything, that a widespread cultural obsession with experience pervades almost every aspect of American culture.  This isn't difficult to see when we look at Christian evangelicals insisting that their feel-goods in church are the Holy Spirit, that their experience of God is real; or in television's effects on viewers in that the vicarious experience is a way to achieve big sales; or football games where fans have rioted in the stands over a defeat; or in the poetry room where I saw, time and again, people seeking a short cut to a higher experience that seemed to elude them when they were straight--off the dope.  Especially odd in that regard is the fact none of these denizens of the poorly written word were even aware of how intoxication from a hallucinogen was causing them to experience bodily hallucinations, sensations that are not connected to reality, and that, while under the influence of the hallucinogen they were experiencing what they led themselves to believe was "the poetic experience".  

This strikes me as a sensation of futility.  Is poetry merely a vehicle for a sort of religious experience?  Sometimes in the fog of intoxication, the host, after an "intermission" out in front of the bar, when everyone got high, would croon to the audience from the stage, even going so far as to call the strange group experience of intoxication "holy" and "a church".  It was like mass hypnosis.  Hitleresque of the guy, really.  One way to establish the dominance the man craves.  Yes, we were all experiencing the bliss of THC intoxication.  I know I was.  In fact, from what I noted at the time, the intermission was the favorite part of all those gathered together in THC's name.  The poetry?  A matter of waiting for the intermission when "the experience" was passed out like the offertory plate at a real church.  

The operative word at the reading according to the host?  Be positive.  That's right.  In some circles being positive means being baked.  Seriously, however, the man seemed intent upon maintaining a feel-good "vibe" all the time.  It's as if he's afraid of "negative", scary feelings, doom, darkness, and of course, ideas critical to his biases and unexamined ideas.  

Buzzkills, right? 

Buzzkill.  Stay positively high all the time.  Don't let the big bad world get between you and staying ripped.  So. Why bother with the poetry then?  Why not just get blasted, blitzed, plowed, or baked?  

". . .destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. . . "

So scary.

OK.  OK.  I get it.  Why not do something you enjoy when you're lit up like a Roman candle? I don't mind such a thing.  When I used to get high, I liked turning up the stereo and simply enjoying the music.  Sometimes, I'd take a walk around the block, even on really hot summer afternoons, simply enjoying the buzz, the scene, the passing sights.  But how does this altered state of consciousness affect poetry?  That's really hard for me to tell.  Many poets and artists do their creative activities while baked or plowed.  Yet, in my thinking, poetry requires a clear head.  Even if the poetic experience itself is real, it's also subtle, and being blunted by a hallucinogen tends to obscure the close proximity of the poetic experience available everywhere to anyone--and in anything.  

I know of one man who had a tendency to associate the poetic experience with religious experience.  Now he's a kind of motivational guru--out preaching "bewilderment", an experience he seeks out as if it's some kind of rare bird that must be spotted every single day for him to find life fulfilling.  There he is, in photographs and YouTube videos, wearing a sort of white karate suit, preaching all about the wonders of shutting off the mind to allow "bewilderment" to seep into consciousness.  But why?  We all should know that too much thinking, too much reliance on reason, can stultify just as easily as it can liberate.  But chasing "the holy" like that carries a stink to it, a stink quite common to the wish to change one's consciousness via artificial means.  In fact, many Oriental philosophers scoffed at such obsessive pursuits as foolish and pointless exercises in denial.  Most expressed--quite stridently too--that the truly enlightened mind is not fooled into believing some higher realm is available through all kinds of exaggerated effort.  In fact, a few sages insisted that's nothing but a game that entirely misses the point of being ordinary and not trying to find bliss.  Some accused Emerson of much the same delusion, but as the adage has it, we know the truth of poetry by its fruits.  And if those fruits are bad, or unripe, or too ripe, then what good was the hot-wired experience?   Emerson's enlightenment is restorative and exceptionally human.  And humane.  

The whole human.  Not the hotwired one.  Space cases and mystification are OK in a casual sense of day-to-day leisure time, but only if space case mentalities and mystification are at least balanced to an extent by reason and the unimpeded intellect.  The art of transformation is the role of the poem, not something by which the poet necessarily uses words as an instrument to get some cosmic relief.  If one's sense of profundity is actually a hallucination, is it still valid? Of course it can be.  But only if it is accompanied by sober reflection and a pinch of analysis and synthesis.  

Another row too far to hoe for many who want the identity but don't feel like actually doing the depth work that moves them out of the superficial and into what very well could be interpreted as the divine.  

It's a bodice ripper of Romantic affectations.  The famous Romantic refusal: Ignoring the vulgar world around you while celebrating your sidelined, marginalized individuality.  This is a sort of romanticization of the intellectual predicament, but it can also be a cottage industry among the people for whom it's all a pose.  

 In fact, as long as some of us are active participants in being consumed by "positive thinking", there is something about attitude that is often either ignored or unexamined:  Attitude is the stance one or a group takes when demanding that something outside of their purview make a change suitable to them.  Attitude, even rebellious attitude, can actually have a positive outcome.  For one, it has gradually taken shape as what is now called "outlaw poetry".  You know: poetry outside of the rules.  

Damned rules!  

The entire thrust of what we call the avant garde is based on a challenge to the institutions of art or poetry.  If the prevailing winds are too suffocating or confining, then an avant garde challenges it.  This is a natural development.  The initial iconoclasts usually shatter the old rules and then gradually develop new ones.  The first iconoclastic exponents are usually a little scattered, fuzzy, more raw than cooked to put this into a cultural trope.   Early folk rock was a little rough around the edges; by the time The Eagles flew down from studio-land, folk rock was slicker than a pig on ice.  Then the constraints and cliquishness surrounding that genre became too rigid and too offputting.  Punk was born.  

But how does anyone challenge the rules if one doesn't know what the rules up to the big challenge actually are? 

I'm not going to skewer young people who are relatively innocent of the uses and misuses of the English language, or who are naive enough to not have come close to developing critical capabilities in regard to poetry they believe they can carry on such loose footing.  Nor am I out to attack hobbyists or people who are simply trying out the waters as they ponder whether or not they can act upon the idea, perhaps, that life can be more than the five-day-a-week job and the television set.  No harm in exploration of an art form either.  After all, when one is testing the waters of an aesthetic life or lifestyle, no one can justifiably expect one to head for the proverbial deep end early on.  Wading into the pool, so to speak, is fine.  But expecting to be heralded as a literary phenomenon is, well, common among amateurs, hobbyists and dilettantes.  Poetry makes some people feel important.  Heroic.  Worthwhile.   

Regardless, the life of a poet seems to me to be something of a calling.  There's an urge, a pestering longing, that needs satisfaction.  This impulse, as it is generally called, is not an inner hollowness to be filled by a practice or behavior so much as a sort of yearning to express what would otherwise remain inexpressible.  We've got questions about life we would like to explore, mysteries to report, subtleties that, unless somehow represented, may escape our grasp, our memories, our consciousness.  How to cut that Gordian Knot and get to the marrow?  That's a question almost none of the people at the spoken word readings I attended ever bothered to think about; rather, they just decided to tell the actual poetic experience to fuck off.  The game is too much fun, the costumery is wealthy, and once again, it's the experience of pretending to be someone one isn't, one that is very important, creative and artistic, that seems to matter.  The trappings.  No actual mental work necessary.  A kind of "instant poet" starter kit, complete with a groovy attitude that orders the rest of the world to either accept or change.  This is an expression of powerlessness--and a projection of power almost no one really has.  

Possibly, much of this sort of insight eventually will come to mind (I'm hoping) should a younger poet push the envelope of the early-on superficial understanding of what it might (or might not) mean to be a poet.  But that insight also is dependent on the use of the razor-sharp mind, the intellect, the ability to use reason (and unreason) to amplify and supplement the imagination, the latter the key that opens a huge doorway to what some may not actually want to see once inside.  

"Writing is hard labor for life," is how Joseph Conrad, one of the greatest English novelists in history, put the predicament of being leashed to the illimitable "muse".  It can be that kind of hard life too.  Learning the craft of poetry can be difficult if not treacherous.  Lots of casualties along the way.  Suicides.  Drunken annihilation.  Overdoses.  Mental illness.  Homelessness.  Starvation.  Sometimes, a great poet is considered greater by the circumstances he or she had to endure to remain a poet open to the world.  The whole world.  Not the imaginary one.  And oddly, many highly admired poets have actually commented on the imaginary world.  Perhaps this is where Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island Of The Mind--at least in one aspect of a sharp metaphor.  

The biggest trick of all (at least from my small time experience) is to maintain one's vulnerability; to stave off callousness and jadedness.  

Plenty of people dabble in spoken word poetry.  There really aren't any hard rules there.  Which is a good thing.  Some denizens of the genre feel a deep need to sound off about the world around them, the private or personal world, the inner investigation, the relation between self and nature, human nature or otherwise.  Others seem to be intentionally out to provoke, and I've long noticed that as younger poets experiment, many are attracted to shock value.  Sometimes this is pure infantilism, reminiscent of teenagers testing limits, stretching wings, and again, projecting power in a world where the adults have all the influence.  Others really do believe that what they're doing on a stage is something groundbreaking and meaningful, however ineptly they are performing a role they may not clearly understand.  Still others, however, are simply deluded, and as I mentioned, many more literally are on drugs.  

OK.  Stop right here.  Influence.  Who's being influenced anyway?  The poet?  Or the poet's audience?  Maybe you're feeling really hot-damn up there under the footlights.  This hot-damnedness is the reason you're up there.  Thus, you're influencing yourself.  And sometimes people even clap at whatever it is you're doing.  Quite an ego boost, eh?  

One awfully self-deluded woman, middle aged, always enthusiastic, has hit the big stage to perform the very same act she began over 25 years ago.  I don't know how many times I had to sit and listen to the woman perform some abysmally dumb monologue she titled "Urban Pueblo".  Worse, she does this supposed salute to high-rise apartment living in New York City "Broadway style".  Rumor has it she actually was on Broadway awhile--a long long time ago.  Hence, she's an overweight and very stoned Liza Minnelli for around five minutes once a month.  She's been going in circles with a big sing-song flourish at the end for so many years one would think she'd tire of herself subconsciously attempting to recapture long-lost glory.  Nope.  On and on she goes, with a deep bow at the end.  

What in the holy hell does that poor woman think she's accomplishing?  As "poetry" her monologue is more than lame.  And did I mention she's a stoner?  She's been repeating a high, perhaps a peak experience, she had maybe 30 years ago.  That deep bow always makes me wish I could chuckle out loud.  But I don't.  I've always maintained a modicum of respect for whatever it is she's doing on the little black stage at the back of a bar.  Interestingly, she seems to know I see right through her.  She doesn't like that.  

Twenty five years ago, when I first heard her do her Broadway rendition of  her somewhat spammy and far-too-upbeat "Urban Pueblo" at a poetry slam, I gleefully said from the audience, "I've been to urban Pueblo, Colorado, and it's nothing like that."  

Oops.  She's been angry at me for "attempting to upstage" her.  Angry for 25 years.  Bubble pops, and here comes the bitterness she's holding down.  

Nearly 21 years later, a good 10 years ago, as I was leaving this reading in the barroom, we chatted briefly, and the bitterness welled up.  What happened?  I don't know what I'd said to get the brunt of it.  As I headed for the door, she glared at me.  

"You derelict!" she shouted.  

She was referring to a period of my life when I was homeless.  With all the stigma I'd endured as a homeless man, the Broadway princess on some kind of pot trip must have really thought she was getting my goat with that one.  

"Kerouac was homeless," I said with a grin.  Then I left.  Amazed.  

Had I just been pitched out of left field?  Again?  What Ptomkin Village had I blown over?  

Ever try to make important political statements without really understanding the political at all? That is a common malady--especially in 2024.  Social justice is a trend.  Hence, if you dare to go to a spoken word reading, be prepared to be assaulted by all kinds of victims, all sorts of ethnic identities as poised against all the other ethnic identities (especially the white ones), and all sorts of guttural stabs at political commentary.   It's one thing to put up with politicos who don't know what an ideology is.  It's one thing to endure lamebrained attacks against the government or against capitalism.  And then it's another thing altogether to see a poetry reading (or a literary magazine) turn into a try out for George Will's punditry position at Washington Post.  Newspaper column-writing in verse is often almost comedic it's so blunt and unknowledgeable.  I mean, be true to your school, but first ensure you're in the right school.  Or graduated from junior high school.  

It's hip to be a third-rate political commentator masquerading as a poet.  A great poet.  Like all the ones you've never heard of because you've been far too busy to undertake even a cursory study of the intersection between culture and politics.  And yes, it has been studied.  By people with far more influence than you.  

Let's again march in formation down Memory Lane.  Yes, little whippersnappers and knee-biters, I I shall recall for you the night I spoke out from the little black stage about the purported "beatniks" in the audience.  As one of the "Immortals", I held forth with a volley of humorous lampoons about how "Beat is boring".  Specifically, I had already begun to sense I was pulling away from the entire shebang surrounding that reading.  I was suffocating.  And my rebellious streak possessed me for around five entire minutes as I told the audience that the hippie movement of the 1960's was pooh-poohed by Jack Kerouac, a right-winger and reactionary who associated the hippies with the communists.  I told him that many in the "Beat fashion movement" also didn't like anyone, much less people sleeping on the streets, stealing their imaginary thunder.  All finger-snapping aside, I'd targeted a "beatnik power couple" who, for likely spurious reasons that had everything to do with feeling powerless in a world where real poets with real college educations failed to take the two, former denizens of the proverbial high school graduation, seriously.  Pretending to be devotees of a form of poetry that never really achieved a definition beyond what its supposed exponents--Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs--seemed to be doing, the "beatnik power couple" usually cast an aura of blackened Buddhism with a stoner's touch.  The desire to be taken seriously like that sometimes staggers me when I think about what those poor people simply did not know about whatever it is they think Beat involved.  

One definition of "beat" has to do with the rhythmic, metrical beat familiar to everything from Matthew Arnold to nursery rhymes.  I've always believed that definition is wholly inadequate.  And in a not-really-a-movement, one its leading lights detached themselves from almost immediately after "beat" became a thing, most "beat" spoken word performers seem to ignore one essential quality: that of being beaten by life.  Beaten down.  Broken.  And thus checking out of the many games that stand in for life in America.  

Anyway, knowing that the Beats of the early 1960s had all kinds of consternation for the emerging hippie movement that had been growing in San Francisco and New York City, and that the hippies didn't really feel like enjoying being beaten or beaten down by life, I ascended the little soapbox stage that night and proclaimed myself a hippie poet.  I badmouthed "the Beats" and shot the peace symbol V at the two "Beats" while suggesting the entire thing was "beat off poetry".  Most in the smallish crowd laughed.  The two "real Beats", who weren't nearly as Beat as they seem to think they are, frowned.  Glowered.  Glared at me.  And I was hardly being serious.  

They complained to the host.  The host then began to treat me as a troublemaker.  More on that later.  

That couple was an odd sight, really.  At one time, after having made friends with a seriously deluded Latino poet from San Antonio, they asked me if I wanted to attend "a Beat reading" at the cliffs above the Rio Grande.  What?  It was going to be a protest.  Against what, exactly?  Probably "los gringos".  But honestly.  What the devil did Beat have to do with the political controversies surrounding illegal immigration?  

"What if you get shot at?  Coyotes [usually those involved in human trafficking] do that to tourists at the river all the time?" 

"No, no!  It'll be great!"  

By the way, one member of the "beat power couple" really hankers to become Number One Poet in the city where I live.  While she can be a pretty good poet, usually much better than most who perform at the bar, she really does seem to be attempting to project power because she feels powerless.  She's pushy.  She wants to dominate.  She's become "a leader" of one of the asundery poetry groups in the city, and hence, this seems to mean, at least to her, that she's--yes, yes--one of "the Immortals".  Which is ridiculous.  She doesn't have the self esteem to put her poetry into any competition for publication in any magazine.  Why?  Still, she seems determined to hype herself in an imaginary pecking order that is exclusively local.  Which is meaningless.  Number one.  In a Three Stooges level "academy" of amateurs, dilettantes and hobbyists.  

In a word, this angling to be at the top of an abysmally tiny dog pile amounts to competition.  Wouldn't it seem a  smallish group of poets that are really invisible within the zeitgeist of a culture almost completely about business, business relations, profit, status and the market would spurn the ethic of that greater community which honors, if anything, competition?  Are there really individuals who believe being at the pinnacle of a mindless pecking order of the imagination is meaningful?  This is another irony that has to do with approach-avoidance  When a group is small, cooperation is likely the better strategy.  If an uninfluential group seeks to become a movement or a true community, internecine warfare and posturing is inimical and restrictive of any move toward unity.  

Snap your fingers.  It's the experience of power, stupid.  

Meanwhile, the beatnik power couple is out for blood in terms of capitalism.  Both boost the idea that they're both socialists and members of a creepy Latino movement known as La Reconquista--the reconquest, the removal of the white man from "our land".   This involves more naive rebelliousness with really little in the name of a a leading principle with which to connect it.  It seems strange to me, by the way, that people who expect me to believe they're Native Americans out to "take the country back" in a deeply reactionary way have sided with Mexico, speaking Espanol, and innocently aligning them with the actual Conquistadors, the white people who took down the Aztec empire for gold and some power.  In other words, the beatnik power couple is quite confused. 

Essentially oblivious to reality.  

This brings to light another serious problem with "outlaw poetry": reactionary fervor.  It's one thing to challenge the institution of poetry as it is in 2024.  It's quite another to literally react against all sorts of things that have nothing to do with poetry.  Responding to "the academy", in my opinion, can either be a healthy dialogue or discourse, or it can remain reactionary and dysfunctional.  

I've written about reactionary behavior in other blog posts.  Americans have been conditioned to react and not think.  And aside from the more obvious reactionaryism along the right's fringes, there is an equally mawkish reactionary fervor on the far or extreme left.  And both wings are attacking one another.  It's a silly exercise in scapegoating and blaming the other for all kinds of problems.  

Are reactionary poets like those I've mentioned nothing more than countercultural versions of the common Donald J. Trump supporter?  In many ways, the answer is yes.  

Reaction.  What seems to be the problem?  What are we reacting against now?  Capitalism?  Or authority?  Often, the biggest malefactor in the squelchy little world of the spoken word circle I attended was a nebulous, amorphous, vaguely defined "academy", a murky phantasm involving poets who are also college professors.  Or who have gone through the trouble of graduating with a Masters of Fine Arts degree.  This "just horrible repression" by an academy of course is an illusion to such reactionaries, people who believe they are "outsiders"; hipster outlaws.  

Apparently, the most obvious feature of capitalism is the feature the "real Beats" (they identify as socialists) altogether missed in their amorphous antagonism: competition.  Being out to snuff out the competition is actually violating the entire Beat ethic--if there is one.  Dropping out of American society as did many exponents of Beat means also dropping out of the political infighting and extremism that is dividing the country at present.  Never mind.  Gotta win a thing.  

OK.  Now I'm laughing.  It's not that competition is really that bad of a thing.  The overweening influence, power and self-interest of capitalism in American culture is such that it's not at all surprising that its defining ethic is going to bleed into areas of the culture where it may not honestly belong.  But to attack capitalism while embracing its defining ethic seems to me to amount to burning one's bridges while standing on them.  

Picture that image: the reactionary "beatnik" stands at the center of the bridge over Colorado's Royal Gorge, spreading kerosene on its wooden walkway, then lights a match, and stands amid the flames while thinking, "That'll show 'em!"  

Do you know who you are?  Good question.  

Typical of what some psychologists might define as "oppositional defiance disorder", such subjects of the approach-avoidance structure that seems to fuel their literary reactionaryism are simply angry.  Like the MAGA rightists who support a con artist for president, these people feel powerless.  Some need to project power in compensation for what they believe they lack.  Yet, as in many cases of dysfunctional behavior, the anger is misdirected at targets that actually could empower them.  There is no such "academy".  Yes, many poets who have taken the time to educate themselves into literacy and have worked really hard at it sometimes tend to find work that contributes to their literary aspirations, and hence, choose to teach English, literature and creative writing at the college level.  

Let's suppose it actually makes sense for people who haven't done the work to become very angry at those who have succeeded because they have done the work.  

Adding the phenomenon of Dunning-Kruger, the syndrome some exhibit in believing they know something they really know little to nothing about, and what do you get?  Spoken word artists who don't want to do the work it takes to succeed, are angry at those who do work to glean some objective success, and the belief their literary ignorance is superior to the knowledge of those they target.  

The designation of "Outlaw Poetry", as a school of literary arts, is somewhat shadowy in that it's poorly defined.  Some suggest it's inspired by the poetry of Charles Bukowski.  Others suggest it is a movement involving a repudiation of a repressive literary culture that presents barriers to those who don't accept its precepts and alignments.  Still others simply think it means not following any rules at all.  It's hard to tell, really, what is happening there when people doff all the ideas and intellectualism inherent in using black-and-white representations to describe reality and even critique the various orders and social constructs that make up the world.  

You'd be hard put to see a local spoken word poet in my city who isn't against Trump supporters--the anti-intellectual horde who is anti-science, anti-higher education, anti-government, etc.  Yet at the same time, many embrace the same set of anti-intellectualism.  

What???

It's not exactly convincing to people who are interested in poetry--spoken or otherwise--that others would pretend literary expertise while knowing next to nothing about what one's bids for power and authority might supposedly point to; and if one's technique is so out of sorts and inept as to literally defy the very essence of poetry (poetry in motion, poetry on the football gridiron, etc), the self-aggrandizing title of expert is silly and absurd.  Which may be the point.  

Who knows what all that antagonism is about?   Oxymorons on the march?  

Years ago, while visiting a psychotherapist, I remember how she expressly told me that druggie poetry or art is nothing more than the same "ain't this shit great?" mentality done over and over again.  It's not as if the sense of expansiveness that accompanies highly focused concentration on one's art is immune from fooling "the subject" into believing his or her output is simply glorious and without flaw.  But if one adds the intoxicating effects of marijuana or cocaine to that bliss, one is going to end up perfectly self-deluded into thinking that even putting garbage on white space amounts to absolute genius.  

I've seen that occurring in real time many times.  Especially at the monthly social hour I attended, one in which participants were already high as kites before hitting the stage, I would see and hear some of the starkest displays of ineptitude I think I've ever seen.  Ain't this shit great?  I'm sure it felt really good to those reading their scrappy litanies.  Which seemed to be the point: the subjective experience.  An experience without of course the demonstrated ability to convey that experience to others.  

I suppose this is where "academic poetry" comes into the picture of those antagonistic to even the merest knowledge of technique, or of the many schools of thought, of theological ideas, of aesthetics or philosophy, politics and human relations that provide context for expressions of both the sublime and of the social melange.  I know I'm different from many spoken word poets: I read.  I read all the time.  I'm really interested in words, how they feel, how they sound, what they mean, where they come from in the history of etymology and the language itself.  I'm interested in ideas, in aesthetic movements, in philosophy, in political science, in art, in literature, in history, and more, and more. . . . 

OK.  Let's sum up: Unconscious iconoclasm.    

POET MAUDIT

I remember the wishful publication drills, 

how they gassed me up, an intoxication almost

enough to kill my doubts.  Flurries of the false

alarms--until my inner crank manhandled

the wheel: my life as poet maudit.  Accursed,

interloper into the Satanic School, grotesqueries,

burning mantle of incongruous distortions,

just like Baudelaire, or Rimbaud and Verlaine,

maybe Hart Crane on an especially good day. 

My mother’s emotional unavailability, wreckage

not meant for editors, also intervened, hours

ticking against numinous grievousness, left me

isolated, mawkish, somewhat memorable.

At least to my enemies.  Of which were many,

the dopers, the stroke-bound alcoholics, adrift

in much the same fantasy, all more bruised

than Beat, most patently unaware of fine points

they trashed as academic.  Now I see it all, 

sentiment everywhere, romantic heroism here

or there, everyone elsewhere.  Like a party

bidden to neglect the uninvited as unacademic,

grocery lists of social justifying.  Look at me.

No.  Me, over here.  Grackles as dawn cracks

over the awakening day, plummeting, an egg.