A few words to my itinerant audience

Preamble to a Reading at The Camptonville Community Center on 09/22/18

I just want to say thank you for coming out tonight, to hear me read some poems, loosen up a bit, and share some communion with each other. I also want to thank Yakshi, and Will Staple, for setting up this reading series and organizing our group of local poets willing to voice the wonders and experiences they feel going through them, even if they are miserable, isolated and dark. It may be odd to say, but poetry like that often makes me feel better, the work of Vallejo, for example.

 I’d also like to say a word about whether this or that contemporary poet is great. The tendency toward hyperbole as a medium of celebrating Our Gang distracts us from enjoying what we can of each other’s work. We’re too close to it for a long-lasting estimate of it’s worth. We can always go to the masters, the giants of literature who have come before us, who have humbly marked the way. But we face the dark forest on our own. It’s good to encourage each other but why get hung up on being Great or not. We ought to be glad we’re here to play at all, and put our desperation aside. Great things can come through all of us, myself included. But Buddhism warns us against the realm of comparison. Fuck that.

I like the way the Dali Llama looks at our current situation. He says the next Dali Llama may not even be an individual at all. He may be a Sangha. By analogy do we need another Great Poet or do we need a community of poets who convey truth and beauty as it flows through us?   It’s a joint venture done in solitude. We know real poetry’s aways been matter of life or death, now more than ever. It’s not a luxury, it’s not a word game. To exalt an individual over the rest of us turns poetry into a spectator sport. Poetry arises to make our spiritual kinship, and the responsibilities that go with that kinship, visible. It’s a shortcut to the genius of the race, as Roehtke pointed out. I’ve seen children come up with lines as delightful as any André Breton ever wrote. “I’m a bear sliding down a glacier picking roses”, for example—written by an eight-grader. We need to sing to see ourselves, to make our Sangha of poetry visible. Readings and creative organizations such Yakshi and Will are creating here do that. Aspen rise from the same root system. And Whitman reminds us of  this circularity: “To have great poetry there must be great audiences”.

So as far as the realm of comparison goes, let’s realize we all won the race when we reached the egg. I saw a Nova show once, that miraculously filmed, not only the sperm darting out of the testicles like blind hummingbirds, floundering a bit in the seminal vesicles before  being picked up by a surging tsunami wave from the prostate, propelled up through the penis to leap like jubilant water drops over a falls into the vagina—a blood-drenched atmosphere which, for her protection, is a cauldron of deadly acid. The film shows alkaline strands the female body generously lets down, for the sperm to swim up in. Without those vines sperm would die. Mortars whistle and explode on all sides, acids hiss like snakes, a lethal rain of tracer rounds ricochets around them, randomly zinging tails that fizzle like fuses as they all swim for their lives. Finally, several sperm make it into the womb and bump their heads against the egg. She requires a chemical key, a courtesy you might say, to be unlocked, that one of them works out somehow, to finally wiggle in. That’s us. We all wiggled into the egg. We’re all winners, we’re all alive.

And what did the losers do? Hang their heads and mope? Not at all. The film shows they surrounded the now fertilized egg and, in unison, began to spin it, with their tails, spin it like a top, giving the new being the ride of its life! They set that baby off on a Dionysian dance, whirling like a dervish. That’s us. The circle of poetry we feel running through us continues that spinning dance. So let’s get to it. In a spirit of gratitude. Glad to be here.