Crasses et Voluptés

I am singling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be

Manifest Destiny is no longer mani-fest.

Civilization self-destructs./Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?

What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers.

Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerence for bullshit.

If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetic, erotic broken grammers, ecstatic religions, heathen outpourings speaking in tongues, bombast public sppech, automatic scribblings, surrealist sensings, streams of consciousness,

found sounds, rants and ravesto create your own limbic, your own underlying voice, your ur voice.

If you call yourself a poet, don´t just sit there. 

Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a ¨take your seat¨ practice. Stand up and let them have it.

If you would be a poet, invent a new

way for mortals to inhabit the earth.

If you would be a poet, invent a new

language anyone can understand.

If you would be a poet, speak new

truths that the world can´t deny.

Through art, create order out of the

chaos of the living.

Make it new news.

Write beyond time.

Reinvent the idea of truth.

Reinvent the idea of beauty.

Question everything and everyone, including Socrates, who questioned

everything.

Be subversive, constantly question-

ing reality and the status quo.

Strive to change the world in such a

way that there´s no further need to

be a dissident.

Hip Hop and Rap your way to liberation.

Your poems must be more than want ads for broken hearts.

Words can save you where guns can´t.

Give a voice to the tongueless street.

See the rose through world-colored glasses.

Be an eye among the blind.

Be naive, non-cynical, as if you had just landed on earth, astonished by what you have fallen upon.

Dig folk singers who are the true singing poets of yesterday and today.

Think subjectively, write objectively.

Like a field of sunflowers, a poem should not have to be explained.

Haunt bookstores.

Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking.

First thought may be worst thought.

Sow your poems with the salt of the earth.

Don´t let them tell you poetry is a neurosis that some people never outgrow.

Don´t ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times.

Make new wine out of the grapes of wrath.

Be the gadfly of the state and also its firefly.