I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. 

It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. 

A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. 

It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco: We got dressed and showed the house You live well the visitor said The slum must be inside you. If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..”

I am your ancestor. You know next-to-nothing about me. There is no reason for you to imagine the rooms I occupied or my heavy hair. Not the faint vinegar smell of me. Or the rubbed damp of Forrest and I coupling on the landing en route to our detached day.

You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity, I was the poet of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch phone books, of failed roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and sharpening shops, jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline factory on the penitentiary road.

A poet of spiderwort and jacks-in-the-pulpit, hollyhocks against the tool shed. An unsmiling dark blond. The one with the trowel in her handbag. I dug up protected and private things. That sort, I was. My graves went undecorated and my churches abandoned. This wasn’t planned, but practice.

I was the poet of short-tailed cats and yellow line paint. Of satellite dishes and Peterbilt trucks. Red Man Chewing Tobacco, Black Cat Fireworks, Triple Hut Creme Soda. Also of dirt dobbers, nightcrawlers, martin houses, honey, and whetstones from the Novaculite Uplift. What remained of The Uplift.

I had registered dogs 4 sale; rocks, dung, and straw. I was a poet of hummingbird hives along with redhead stepbrothers.

The poet of good walking shoes—a necessity in vernacular parts—and push mowers. The rumor that I was once seen sleeping in a refrigerator box is false (he was a brother who hated me). Nor was I the one lunching at the Governor’s mansion.

I didn’t work off a grid. Or prime the surface if I could get off without it. I made simple music out of sticks and string. On side B of me, experimental guitar, night repairs and suppers such as this. You could count on me to make a bad situation worse like putting liquid make-up over a passion mark.

I never raised your rent. Or anyone else’s by God. Never said I loved you. The future gave me chills. I used the medium to say: Arise arise and come together. Free your children. Come on everybody. Let’s start with Baltimore.

New Poetry Workshop with Hoa Nguyen: on C.D. Wright’s One with Others

In this workshop, we will read and write through One with Others by C.D. Wright.

Format: Read, write, repeat. Workshops are conducted in real time and delivered so you can engage on your time. 

Weekly written materials, a podcast recording, and an optional Google video-call feature connect participants.   Each workshop is recorded. First we read and devote the first hour to reading the…

1.

No techniques on display, not particularly. No reason to begin in the middle, save that it all is already underway and to continue searching for the beginning is a lost cause really. You give up the right of starting at the beginning once you rise up from all fours and decide to leg it as a bipedal going forward. 

2.

I do like a certain amount of order but it’s an internal struggle every time I start to accumulate bits and pieces of writing (or anything for that matter). Ideally, life happens and it gets lost. This has its drawbacks, but at least you don’t have to live through the subtle, creeping, and all of a sudden overwhelmingly invasive accumulation of what Philip K Dick called kipple, the Universe’s fatal entropy and ultimate laugh. Man is submerged by stuff. The end.