Odyssey

Oh the places you will go,
in hopscotch, morse code paths
to destiny, to existence. Check
under each footprint and God
will hide between your toes.
This is no common symphony,
harmony, no triplet stanza to follow.
Tread softly let the whip of summer
pass through your veins, grab you up
by the waist and carry you away.
Never fly straight to never. Always
stop along the way. Here the poet
clears the brush and ventures through
valleys of shadows, through darkened hearts,
making glow worm trails will the souls of their feet.

Release The Beast

“The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation. When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again—the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist.”


It seems to me that Andrew Sullivan, author of the recent essay, “Let Poetry Die”, in an online edition of “The Daily Dish” needs to update his home library. It is hard for me to believe that anyone, especially those in the writing field, could ignore the growth of poetry since the modernists. To say that poetry stopped at Ashbery is to say that the last real painters were Picasso and Pollock and that conceptual art has no place in society. It’s a pretentious statement to say the least, and in my opinion, a fairly ignorant one. Sullivan calls for poetry to be a phoenix, to die and be reborn from the ashes of its destruction, but what he doesn’t realize, I think, is that poetry is constantly renewing itself.

One can’t ignore the changes that have come through poetry that are real examples of poetry. The fact that Sullivan has the audacity to say that poetry was lost after Ashbery is a real slap in the face to amazing poets like Allen Ginsburg, Ezra Pound, Yusef Komunyakka and Rita Dove. The face of poetry and the face of the world have changed since Elliot and Frost (although their poetry is still a strong house). Just because Andrew Sullivan can’t accept change doesn’t mean he should chase poetry around like a maniac with a pitchfork. Look at Slam Poetry; look at all the performance poetry that is leaking out from big cities on down to little places like Lexington. Poetry is alive and is thriving; people just have to know where to find it. Look back at beat poetry, and post-modern poetry. They have changed the face of the way people read poetry and you look at poets like Billy Collins who have followed the footsteps of poets like Frank O’Hara and realize that poetry is adapting to become closer to the reader. It’s transforming itself for its audience. Billy Collins (certainly not a poet in Sullivan’s eyes) is one of the most popular poets of today and his roots can be seen in O’Hara’s poetry. It’s obvious his style is all his own, but his ideas are rooted in the modernists. Frank O’Hara said in “Personism, a Manifesto” that “The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages,” and that’s what has become a characteristic of contemporary poetry across the board. And it’s not surprising that poetry today is under a microscope, tied up for execution. Isn’t that what happened with Picasso? With Warhol? Just as post-modernist art has been beaten down, so have poets like Pound—following a Pollok-esque style of poetry. Art will forever be criticized and there will forever be people like Andrew Sullivan who don’t open themselves up to art.

It’s not poetry that’s pushing society away. Society doesn’t realize what poetry is. Society is becoming more accepting of the mediocre and the downright terrible. With the availability of blogs and web sites now, anyone can be a great poet, but that’s not really how it should be. I agree with Mr. Sullivan that poets shouldn’t write for other poets—they need to remember who their real audience is, but I believe poets today need a lesson in constructive criticism. Poets write for other poets, because other poets are the only ones who are willing to say, “Man, this is really terrible.” For a writer, your work is your baby. It’s your own creation, but, as Mitchell Douglas would say, “You have to be willing to let them kill the baby.” Otherwise, the mediocre seeps into our publications and the poetry that is wide-spread throughout society. Poets should be conscious of their audience, but their audience is responsible for keeping the poets in line.

It’s a fine line to walk, between accepting criticism and calling out for personal creativity, but the amount of poetry that is accepted today that shouldn’t be is vastly understated. Personally, I think that Sullivan’s statement that poetry should be “driven out of the universities with burning pitch forks.” (first of all, how can a metal pitch fork be burning?) is ludicrous. It’s the MFA “cookie-cutter” programs that are weeding out this mediocre that Sullivan is so passionate about demolishing. Sure, there are poets from those kinds of programs that stick with a copied style that no one likes to read, but writers like Nikkey Finney come with those programs, Kelly Norman Ellis and Crystal Wilkinson. MFA programs need to adapt their curriculum—update it to new forms. They might be breeding mediocrity, but they shouldn’t be done away with. They need to be revised. I was under the impression that it was important for a writer to learn the rules before breaking them—maybe I’m wrong, but these programs are dishing out poets that are the blood of poetry today.

They’re the blood of a beast that is more mighty and terrible and awesome than Mr. Andrew Sullivan realizes. Poetry is constantly renewing itself and whenever society can stop chaining it up and threatening it with these mysterious metal pitchforks that burn, it can thrive. Poetry is not a beast to be killed. Society needs to cut off its own choke collar, accept change and see the art growing around it. Don’t kill poetry—release it.

Aquainted

(Winner of the "Take Back the Night" Festival 2010)


Night is in the far corner of her bedroom,
arms over bony knees, tucked behind
the moonlit curtains, waiting
for the door handle to stop
rattling the glow-in-the-dark
planets hanging from her ceiling.

She is asphyxiated by the eternity
between the dips of the horizons,
hoping to be extinguished
into silent sunrise so she can
pretend she doesn’t exist,
so she can go back to bed
and pretend it isn’t so warm.

Night has lost her nerve
to her own reflection. She is afraid
of the black in her eyes and the stars
on her skin, all the constellation
blue prints. She smothers them in
flannel pajamas and prays the pounding
in her head will disappear behind
the bed skirt and stay with all
the lost socks and wool sweaters.

She hides inside her cornflower
blanket and imagines she
is the sun inside a jar, flickering
through flutters of wings,
pushing against the lid,
wishing someone had
remembered air holes.

lexington (1st draft)

my first breaths were drawn blue.
even at birth i wanted to be a part
of the sky and my mother said
i wouldn’t open my eyes for a month

so i listened to daddy’s voice
and wondered what I was.

maybe i’m late discovering
myself; my eyes just opened
and i have these new fingers spread
over the curve of my brow to shield
orange kentucky summer.

why couldn’t i have been a tobacco field cloud?
i have these arm angles that bend
over body and these palms of hands
that taste hay bales and sweat
off newborn calves’ backs.
the air is so dry
full of morning

here i am
drawing blue breath
and squeezing my toes around
all this grass they call blue.
but to me, it’s just as green
as the vines in my chest

i am rooted
in this place where
blue was my first breath.

Random Rants

I'm not really sure if I ever got around to one central point....but that's what rants are for anyway. Just some thoughts on humanity:

The human race is incredibly fascinating. Fascinating and hilarious, I might say. Being a part of the race, I can’t say I’m not susceptible to its calamities, its chaos. However, if one steps back and looks at how easily we tattoo the history of our race on our skin they might find that the pigment is so distorted we can’t tell which way is backwards and which is our front. Humans remember in a way that is unlike the rest of earth’s inhabitants. We remember the mistakes of the past and take them on as our own burlap load over this rail-tie crossing journey we call life. My sins are the sins of my mother, of her mother, of hers and so on…


This isn’t to say that we should forget the past at all. That’s how things like the Holocaust repeat themselves. No, we shouldn’t forget what we’ve learned over the course of our existence, but have we paid so much attention to what our father’s father’s father’s father did that we spend each day making it our duty to make up for it. What the human race fails to see is that we cannot recall the entire history of our ancestors’ sins on our bones or they’ll break. We must own our own sins and right them before anything else.

What am I getting at? Let me find my point here.

If we continue to try and make up for things that are gone and done with, how will we move forward? We constantly live in the past and with our necks craned so far behind us, we’re liable to stumble over our next big problem. Honorable as it may be to try and make up for our blunders, we over exacerbate them by bringing them up day after day.

Here’s what I propose:

Make a mistake (for it’s good to make mistakes every now and again) and learn from it. Apologize, repent, whatever you have to do, and then move on. Move on. In Isaiah 43:18 God says, “’Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.’” He goes on to say that He is making new things and making, “’a way in the desert; and streams in the wasteland.’” God makes all things new again and forgives those who repent. We should remember our sin, learn from our sin, but should not dwell on it. The whole point of having a savior is having sins removed. Our transgressions are gone and forgotten by God, so why do we insist on remembering them.

I’m afraid, I haven’t quite reached what I intended to say initially. We as humans, as people have difficulties accepting the fact that we’re no longer guilty in God’s eyes. That’s not to say that we don’t sin, but that we’re forgiven for what we do. When God wipes the slate clean, it’s so hard to wipe it clean in our minds.

There are terrible things that our own nature can lead to when left unchecked, but they are also things that I think we inherently know are wrong. However, we can’t seem to forget the years of slavery that was put on the African Americans in the U.S. or that Blacks were discriminated against for years after was slavery was gone. I’m not saying these things should be forgotten, just put to rest. We can’t atone for something forever. I’m also not saying that God forgives all of America for that blotch of iniquity, because I don’t know the mind of God and can’t speak for him. All I’m trying to say is that we as a people need to put to rest all of our reservations. I can’t look at every person on the street with a different race than mine and think, Oh, well, I better be nice to them because of all that stuff that happened in the past.

That’s not getting rid of the problem. The only way to be rid of racism is to look at each individual person as a person with thoughts and ideals. We as Christians are taught to love all people. Jesus says to his disciples in Mathew 25:45 “’I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” We are called to not just be evangelicals or to “save” the masses, but to love all people and serve them through our service to God. Service comes from love and therefore if we love God, we serve him. If we love people, we serve them. How do we love people? Look at them as individuals and stop remembering the history of the world when we see the color of someone’s skin.

The way we remember also gives me another point—we hold grudges. We can’t let go of, not only our own transgressions, but the sins that others have committed against us. Forgiveness is a mouthful for humans—for Americans especially. We’re taught from an early age that this world is eye for an eye and that no wrong should go unpunished.

Unpunish it.

That’s another dare I have for you. The next time someone says something or does something to you, love them and let it go unpunished. We’re not the judges of the world. We as Christians are not God’s mouth and we cannot speak for him. It is not my job or anyone else’s to condemn those who do wrong. That’s God’s job. Our job is to love people. Our job is to stop hurting people with the way we remember their debts to us and the way we live around them. Our job is to be the servants of people regardless of what they do to us. That’s how Christ came into the world and that’s how He taught us to be throughout His teachings. We must come with a childlike eagerness to the Lord and we must stop looking inwardly to how we’ve been hurt. Look into the eyes of that one co-worker you can’t stand, look into the lines of the face of that kid that insists on insulting you and tell me that Jesus doesn’t love them too. Remember that they are one of God’s creations as much as you are and remember that God forgave you for the wrongs you did. Tell me that there’s one reason that we shouldn’t forgive and love them.