doubt is the epidemic of poets and we will all die on cinco de mayo

I am feeling again like an island far off in the lonely ocean; far from the rest of the poetry community. They want procedures, and I want messiness. They want found language, I believe that my own language was found--a treasure even, buried deep within my neuroses. They want statistics and multiculturalism. I think stats are an invention of the past because they only tell lies, and sometimes i think that multiculturalism was a word made up by middle class white people so that they could endorse cinco de mayo. i believe in knowing and navigating the world by looking within. looking out towards the external world i see nothing but fragments, and distractions, and noise--who can get anything out of it? They want innovation. I say innovation is driven by greed. People at the Mac store use the word innovation. What's wrong with tradition? What's wrong with using what we know, which probably different than what anybody else knows. I want to write about Nature damnit... and I want to use the pronoun "I" too AND mean it.., damnit. I am afraid, a real white-girl fear, that if we only use appropriated language, if we only want to use math and science and made up fields like sociology to speak in our art...we will not only forget the under represented humans of our earthly family, but we will forget that WE OURSELVES are humans. We will forget the parts of us that make us beautiful. I am really nervous about living in a world where all the art and poetry will be only created by a addictive desire for seeking out the new. This is the same mentality that people have about their possessions. The desire for newness is toxic for us. I say lets look to the eternal-- if nothing is eternal, then at least we will stop trashing the planet with new things.

here is a series of questions that i posed to my classes. So far, No one has responded.

warning: this may be unnecessary and otherwise.

I'm thinking about the words...research...representation....and emotional:

1. I've been thinking about using research to represent the other, instead of using the internal landscape ie experience/ emotion/ insights.

2. I'm thinking about how statistics have often been used in history as a way to persuade us into ideologies that are often driven by racism, misogyny, fear, and discrimination. How can we make someone more human in our poetry by using someone else's numbers? How do we make other lives have their own voices?

3. I'm thinking about narrative poetry when not examined while its being crafted and how it can also be dangerous.

4. I am thinking about different knowledges (ie. wisdom versus knowledge or religious/anncestral/metaphysical), and if a person can examine their internal landscape deep enough past the surface of our cultures influence past the breakers of our own paradigms and penetrate into a place where there is no "other". And/Or how can I let multiple kinds of knowledges come into my poetry?

5. I am wondering if i will ever feel _okay_ with representing the other.

6. If our poems are coming from the funnels of our perspectives.... is every poem that is transparent about the funnel labeled...emotional?

***I am sure that these questions are problematic, and loaded, and clumsy. But I've been thinking about them with limited language to express them... and I wanted to turn to you for your thoughts about these ideas/language.


PLEASE, if you have ideas about where and what poetry is and should go or do, why you write, and how you feel about writing about people who are different from you... comment here.