Can There Be Anything Else Besides Narrative

This is an essayish that is not meant to persuade you to do anything, but to relieve some of the fear and judgment around writing whatever comes out of you.



The only experience I have with poetry is the kind that wells out from the fingernails, from the gut meat, or the purple crevices of the mind. Some sense of it comes from my reading too, but let's face it I wouldn't even know where to look for poetry outside the canon. In guidance to where the poetry of the people lives, I don't trust the motivated insecurity of hipsters, and I think I trust the white knuckles of scholars even less. **This is a guarded confession of my little study in the area of poetic theory and criticism.

However! I still count on my hypothesis that: the conventions of staying away from sentimentality, staying clear from harmless egotism has taken a stronghold on a very natural well of creativity--our own sloppy experience.

In my personal understanding of the way things work, Poetry has a very similar evolution as Feminism. What a miraculous voice it was that spoke out of the first people that said, " I am not these lines in which someone else has drawn with a very clumsy pen" Avant-garde, I believe was in some degree the same statement. Both must have come from a first peek of light that belongs to a universe of stars. But it was not the message that made them true, instead it was the vulnerability behind these claims that caused the earth to quiver. The desperateness. It was the boiling energy behind these ideas that made them so human

If you silence a people, which means if you keep them from expressing what life is, in the language most accessible to them-- you are in a sense murdering these people. Feminism, and other ideas of expanding our awareness, usually come from feeling of immediate threat. A voice of utter urgency. " If I cannot use my voice, I am invisible, I am dead."

To devalue Narrative Poetry, is to kill many people. Our personal senses are the only means to understanding our physical world. Our experiences are the only means of understanding our minds. Why, then are we so critical of trite, over sentimental, cliche poetry? I say, if
you are writing simple words about your heartbreak; about your sorrow; you are merely keeping alive by the very small and brave whisper inside you.

Our voice is necessary to live. That is the lesson in any movement towards a compassionate world. Disband the judgmental dialogue around 'good poetry'; dig up the poetry from their graves in the Canon. Let us write poetry that completely involves ourselves.

Oy Vey, with that said:


Just, Fuck you.

A man cussed me out
for parking to close
to a car that wasn't his

& I felt a shiver all day in my elbows
the kind seventeen year olds have
until I blossomed
a very important fact
in this fable.

There are people
who are more unplesant than me.
a-men.