Emily Dickinson Ars Poetica

http://www.openculture.com/2018/12/emily-dickinson-writes-poem-short-video-introduction.html

fuck you ee cummings by Ron Currie

fuck you ee cummings

now would be a tough time for ee cummings
what with autocorrect and all
i know
because i'm writing an ee cummings poem
and i refuse to turn off autocorrect
because i want you to know how hard i worked
to write this for you
so instead of going the easy route
i'm training autocorrect
to accept, for example, a standalone lowercase i
i type it three times
and on the third time autocorrect starts to understand
that i will not relent
and it's like, "okay fine
what the fuck do i care
you can have your lowercase i, psycho."

yesterday i read a short article
they all have to be short these days
like these lines i'm writing now
are they short enough?
i can make them shorter
i've heard no one can concentrate anymore
so if you like
i can
trim
things
up
pare
things
down
to accommodate.
shit, though,
"accommodate" is probably too long a word
for the times
my apologies.

anyway
the short article i read
was written by a young woman
who photographs the dead and dying
which probably sounds weird
also macabre
but she does it at the request of families
who want these pictures
and it's beautiful
there is one photograph
of a mother in a hospital bed
she has just given birth
and the baby has died
they knew he was going to die
because his lungs didn't form properly
so he was fine in utero
while oxygen was being provided
by his mother
but the moment he had to breathe on his own
that was that
the doctors took the baby
while he was still alive
and set him on his mother's chest
so they could feel each other, however briefly
and the baby wrapped his little arm
around his mother's face
a totally reflexive thing for a baby to do
grasp and cling, you know
but also, frozen in a photograph,
the most touching gesture i've ever seen
i will never forget that image
i will see it on my own deathbed
looking at it, i cried
but not like she did.

most of the time
the things i read
day after day
blend together into a drone of static
you know how that feels?
scrolling, scrolling
insensate, narcotized
but that article
and that photo
jesus christ did i feel alive
sitting there weeping
it was glorious
to borrow that grief

every year
my wife and i and some friends go to cape cod
for a week at the end of summer
and the past few years
there have been more and more sightings of great white sharks
attacks, too
last year a young man was killed by one
less than a mile from where we stood
sipping wine in the shallows
and a town councilman
started calling for sharks to be killed
like he was some third-tier character in "jaws"
the kind everyone in the audience knows is an asshole
and an idiot
my wife worries about the sharks
but i don't
let me say right now
that in the unlikely event i am killed by a shark
i do not authorize anyone to go killing sharks on my behalf
as though they are wrong
to eat bipeds
who present themselves as easy meals
particularly when those bipeds
are busy destroying everything
the sharks prefer to eat.

a few months ago i sat in a room with some very smart people
and asked them a question
i requested that they only answer yes or no
"do you value human life over all other kinds?" i asked
they all answered yes
only one of them hesitated.

we were working on a television project about climate change
and each day we talked to experts
and learned
about how everything is dying
and we are responsible
and yet
every one of them still believed
in an unshakable bedrock way
that human life is more valuable
than anything else.
me personally, i'll swerve and veer into a telephone pole
to spare a squirrel.

we sat in that room for weeks
drank dozens and dozens of beverages
seltzer and unsweetened tea and kombucha
and put the plastic containers in the recycling bin
like good citizens.

at night i would go home
and drink beer and then
when the clock indicated it was time
to go to bed
i would take an over-the-counter sedative
and still wouldn't really sleep.

the reason i'm mad at ee cummings
is because he convinced several generations of would-be poets
that writing in all lowercase letters is somehow inherently profound
it isn't
it's just kind of dumb
and i don't care if ee cummings persists in the canon
and my work is forgotten
that doesn't make writing in all lowercase letters any less stupid.

sometimes talk among my friends turns to
the degradation of language
particularly written language
we care about these kinds of things
we're weird like that
and certainly it's not ee cummings' fault
that now everyone communicates
in abbreviations and cave scrawlings
but i'm angry
and he's a convenient target
and don't come at me with how
the rules of language
are classist and oppressive
designed to keep the tools of self-expression from the masses
i'm sick of that kind of talk
i grew up poor and i figured english out
so shut the fuck up and learn how to spell.

the friend of mine who cared the most about language
died last year
he was my best friend
and he just dropped
here today, gone tomorrow
that was hard
i drank too much for a while afterward
i drink a lot anyway
but in the months after he died
i was really getting after it
and i cried a lot
i wrote a book about him and us
that no one wants to publish
maybe because it's about two straight white guys
maybe because it's not a very good book
and that's okay
i think there are things about the book he wouldn't have liked
but he might have liked this poem
i wish i could show it to him and find out.

i'm tired of the drone of static
i don't want to hear your opinion
tell me instead about what you've lost
let me see the photo of the moment you lost it
rather than a photo of you on a beach
tell me about what you love more than anything
tell me about what scares you.

what i'm trying to say is
let's get real
fewer pictures of your brunch, please
and more pictures of dead babies
but we've had plenty of pictures of babies
now that i think about it
babies piled like cordwood in dachau
babies with their heads caved in in mississippi
babies burned and screaming outside trang bang
babies face-down in the rio grande
and we still go about our business
place our napalm orders before the end of the fiscal year
and fret idly about our bodyfat percentage
or whether men sit with their legs splayed too wide
on the subway.

so again, i want to hear from you about something real
but as a show of good faith
I'll go first
What scares me on this morning
is the thought that somewhere in the world
at a circus or some shitty unregulated zoo
somewhere in kazakhstan
or kansas
someone is using an ankus
which is a fancy word for a sharp metal hook
to get an elephant to do things like stand on its back legs
or get on board a train car.

i worked for a circus once
no, really
it was a small operation and had no performing animals
but there was a guy there who had worked with larger outfits
like ringling brothers
he fancied himself something of an intellectual
and tried to make the case
that animals like elephants have to be abused
in order to get them to behave
he was dismissive of any argument to the contrary
like for example that maybe we shouldn't keep elephants in captivity
in the first place
for the purpose of entertaining us
and then they wouldn't need to "behave"
he was an asshole
he probably thinks climate change is a hoax
he's so smart and no one can pull the wool over his eyes
i hope someday an elephant stomps his fucking guts out
i mean it
that's a performance i'd like to see
i would stand and applaud.

yesterday i was doing pull-ups and pushups
in the park
like an idiot
and an acquaintance came by on a bicycle
on his way to work
he's a lawyer for the aclu
we talked about how the planet is burning
and how in the context of that fact
nothing else really seems to matter
i told him how in the room
where we wrote about climate change
the scientists told us things privately
that they would never say publicly
because no one would believe them
because the truth is too horrible to believe
we also talked about david buckel
a lawyer who set himself on fire in brooklyn in 2018
to bring attention to what we've done to the planet
and then my friend had to get to work
and i went back to my pull-ups and pushups.

david buckel set himself on fire in brooklyn
doused himself with gasoline
struck a match
added a bit more carbon to the atmosphere
to make a point
and that night
after they'd come and taken his body away
a woman took a picture of the charred grass where he'd died
and posted the picture on twitter
not to call attention to what he'd done
not to demand we pay attention to his death
but to complain to the municipality
about children having to see the scorch marks
as they played soccer
which is about as ridiculous a response
as i can imagine
to a man killing himself
to save everyone else.

who will think of the children, indeed.

i have a dream
that sometime in the future
we will finally understand what we've done
and every april 14th
on the anniversary of david buckel's death
hundreds of thousands of us will set ourselves on fire
to honor him.

did you know that elephants have pads in their feet
that let them communicate with each other over miles?
they don't like lifting their feet off the ground
you have to really hurt them to get them to do it
because to an elephant
lifting your feet off the ground
is like you and me covering our eyes and ears
did you know that elephants
will break into metal containers
to recover the bodies of family who have been slaughtered
and give them a proper burial?
that they have grieving rituals
they perform year after year?
that like us
they never forget their dead?

most people don't realize it
but climate change denial doesn't really exist
except in the united states
england
and australia
the reason for this
is a man named rupert murdoch
who for a long time has controlled
great portions of the media
in those countries
rupert murdoch
is worse than hitler
i don't say that lightly
i don't toss around words like "fascism" and "genocide" willy-nilly
so when i say
rupert murdoch is worse than hitler
know that i mean it
in practical terms
like lives lost
and i believe
that history
if humanity survives in a form that can continue to record history
will bear me out
fuck you rupert murdoch
go back to where you came from
you aussie prick.

what i'm saying here is really important to me
by which i mean i have spent countless nights
in countless different rooms
staring at countless different ceilings and thinking about this
and because it's so important
and i want it to reach the widest possible audience
i decided to write a poem.

of course this is a pretty long poem
and free verse to boot
so if you decide you need to go do something else
i totally get it.

when you're a writer people sometimes ask
why you decided to be a writer
insofar as there's any answer
the thing i've settled on is that
writing is an act of faith
the faith that you and i love the same things
fear the same things
grieve the same things
no matter that i am a man and you are a woman
or that i am white and you are latino
or that i am american and you are afghani
faith, in short, that love and fear and grief are the same thing everywhere
and the rest is just details
and that if i write about the things i love and fear and grieve,
you will see yourself in me
and vice versa
and having looked in the mirror
and seen ourselves rendered strange yet recognizable
we will be less lonely and afraid and angry
and less inclined to want to kill each other
and less likely to dismiss each other's suffering
maybe.

but that sort of feels like greeting card bullshit and
i am not interested in feel-good nonsense
or we-are-the-world platitudes so
let me offer the ballast of acknowledging
that there are real and meaningful differences between us
that i neither deny nor discount
all i'm suggesting is
i am capable of a trick
by which i can imagine
the lives of people who are not me
nothing more or less than that.

and that you are capable of it, too.

as an example, one of the earliest pieces of fan mail i ever got
was from a sudanese refugee living in canada
who read my first book
and wanted to thank me for rendering her experience of the refugee camps in south sudan
so faithfully
when i told her i was a white boy from new england
and had never set foot in sudan
let alone in the camps where so many people were slaughtered
she couldn't believe it
kept testing my story
to find the holes
but there were none
i just looked at some pictures, i told her
and wrote a story that
her heart knew to be true.

i can even put myself in rupert murdoch's mind
despite the fact that he's a demon from hell
who will be directly responsible for the deaths of millions
once the waters start rising in earnest
he loves his children i bet
i can latch onto that love
feel it
replicate it
render his humanity
after all, there's plenty of evil in me, too.

neither of us will be spared, rupert, you shriveled, hateful old fuck.

sitting here looking at the baby lying on his mother's chest
appearing to sleep except for the blue tinge of his skin
sitting here thinking about the cuts behind the elephant's ears
and her loneliness
unable to hear her family through her feet
i feel an eruption of sadness so strong it seems i can't bear it
i know you've felt the same
so let's maybe talk about that
instead of which presidential candidate we favor.

don't worry; i'm not a revolutionary
i'm not brave enough to do anything except write
though i do sometimes have idle thoughts like
the last radical act left to us might be
to destroy the internet
if such a thing is even possible anymore.

this'll sound weird but
sometimes i worry the arrangement
between me and my dog
is one of warden and prisoner
that every act of domestication through history has been
nothing but evil
predicated entirely on the fact that we happen to have
the most impressive brains on the planet.

certainly plenty of animals have had worse lives than my dog
he's spoiled rotten
but i was listening to an interview with a guy who studies
the relationship between humans and animals
and he said something interesting about the movie "e.t."
what if e.t. had whisked elliott away to his home planet
and put a collar on him and told him when he could and could not
eat
go to the bathroom
breathe fresh air
feel the sun on his face
or worse
had strapped elliott into some rig that kept him from being able to move anything
but his eyes
as e.t. and his buddies cut and prodded and shocked and burned
and then e.t.
as justification
said "sorry elliott, but
we simply had to know what kind of effect
this drain cleaner has when applied to your bare eyeballs
and left there for thirty-six hours
and we're smarter than you so
surely you can see how all this is entirely justified
or at least you would be able to see that
if you could see anymore
which you can't."

i think about those smart people in that room
cooking up stories about climate change
talking each day about how we've fucked everything up
and yet still so certain
that we're the best, most important thing
in the universe
with our big brains
and impressive thumbs.

i have no idea why this poem is becoming
so spielberg-heavy
but fuck it
sometime you just go
where it takes you.

a smart man once said
that the quality of our thoughts
can only be as good
as the quality of our language
so let me engage in something even more futile than writing a poem
or setting myself on fire
and ask you to communicate in complete sentences
ask you to care about the difference between
your and you're
ask you to understand
that language
used skillfully
is how you become me
and i become you
language
used skillfully
is how we care more about dead babies
than fucking instagram sunsets
language
used skillfully
is how we learn to hear
with our feet.

Raw and Genuine Poets Marianne Moore

"Poetry"by Marianne Moore


I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond 
all this fiddle. 
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one 
discovers in 
it after all, a place for the genuine. 
Hands that can grasp, eyes 
that can dilate, hair that can rise 
if it must, these things are important not because a  

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because 
they are 
useful. When they become so derivative as to become 
unintelligible, 
 the same thing may be said for all of us, that we 
do not admire what 
we cannot understand: the bat 
holding on upside down or in quest of something to  

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless 
wolf under 
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse 
that feels a flea, the base- 
ball fan, the statistician— 
 nor is it valid to discriminate against "business documents and 
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make 
a distinction 
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the 
result is not poetry, 
nor till the poets among us can be 
"literalists of 
the imagination"—above 
insolence and triviality and can present 

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," 
shall we have 
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, 
the raw material of poetry in 
 all its rawness and 
that which is on the other hand 
genuine, you are interested in poetry.