Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day, with an autobiography in poems, best poetry lists, and an example of my writing process.
Do write a poem of one’s own to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, every day if possible; it’s a tool for processing the experience of life and for creating meaning and connection.
Act One
A definition of terms, or What is Poetry?
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; sounds which are analogies of form or what Gaston Bachelard called coquilles au parole.
So also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
Act Two
Being an Apology for my digressive ars poetica; my writing style is idiosyncratic and strange, but so am I.
Once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale and tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
Act Three
An offering, ephemeral as memories borne by perfume and soaring on the wind, up into the gaps of reality through the gates of our dreams, to the Infinite, free from the flags of our skin, of which only echoes and reflections remain, etched upon our histories by the lightning of illumination to balance against the terror of our nothingness.
Sounds and Echoes
Once there was a sound
Without a shell to echo it
Not the vast roar and thunder
Of the sea
And her moonstruck tides
Chaos and the birth of universes
Undulating with the splendor of life
In all our thousands of myriads
Limitless possibilities of becoming
Dance with the Impossible in rapture and terror
Hope and despair, faith in each other as solidarity of action
Versus the pathology of our disconnectedness
And the lightning shatters us with fracture and disruption,
Sublimes the chasms of darkness we are lost in
A negation which is also a gift
Opening spaces of free creative play
Such is the embrace of death as liberation
From the limits of our form,
The flaws of our humanity,
And the brokenness of the world.
We escape the spirals of our shell
Soar among celestial spheres
Become exalted and defiled
Free and nameless as wild things
I am sound and echo
Abandoning the shell I have sung myself free from
Where am I now?
Act Four
Manifestoes of Action; poetry as revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision, reimagination and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch prints, curious and strange, which I would project myself into as dream gates. William S. Burroughs, beatnik friend of my father the counterculture theatre director, would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heavens and hells, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in disruption, fracture, and chaotization, and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Gödel’s Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves Bringing the Chaos; reimagination and transformation, the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2022, We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words; On this day of winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and possibly as democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as Russia and China test our will and threaten to unleash global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, pandemic, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only one year ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.
When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.
And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised. Languages are a hobby of mine, often grounded in reading books which have immeasurably shaped my own writing and speaking style and turn of phrase.
Chinese is my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with my teacher of martial arts, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and much else, who spoke, in addition to superb British English full of Anglo-Indian and Shanghailander idiom, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1920 when he joined the Whampoa Military Academy through the Second World War, escaping the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when my father arranged for him to teach me. He was a window into other worlds and times to me, was Sifu Dragon.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded, and I hope liberate us from them.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.
Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and political.
During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.
Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Act Four
A benediction
May yours be days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Act Five
A coda in the form of Modern American and World Literatures reading lists, which like all reading lists that claim to represent a canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
Here I have disambiguated Modern American Poetry from authors who cannot be represented among the six ethnicities to make it easier for people to find authors who speak for them and offer spaces to grow into, as the original purpose of my lists, which eventually included 27 national literatures, was for choice reading for high school students free from state and school board control or any criteria other than quality.
Here also I offer an autobiography in poems, entitled The Grief of Influence, my choices of best poetry of the last couple years, and an explication on my writing process with examples.
The Grief of Influence: an autobiography in poems
We may tell our stories through the works we have cherished and the circumstances we discovered and made them our own, as voices in which we share and which can speak both to and for us; identity is a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation to change across time.
This is especially true regarding works in which the thoughts of others across vast epochs of time, cultural schema, paradigms and topologies of human being, meaning, and value have become our own through reading, described so deliciously in the title of the foundational book by Heather Clark on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Grief of Influence.
First was Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra, a talisman of protective magic sung by my mother and others when police fired on student protestors in the most terrible incident of state terror since the Civil War, Bloody Thursday People’s Park Berkeley 1969. I was nine, holding my mother’s hand, when I was hurled from my body by the concussive force wave of a police grenade and Most Sincerely Dead for moments while I stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible futures. I returned to the sideral universe from my Awakening in my distraught mother’s arms and said; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
Second must be the poem that fired my imagination and anchored how I constructed identity through romantic love with my partner Dolly, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I cast us into the roles of the tragic lovers as a past life when I discovered the poem at the age of twelve, as things began to change in my feelings about our relationship during a sixth grade year mostly devoted to reading the classic study of folklore, Frasier’s Golden Bough. We created an elaborate backstory for our romance of shared lives across centuries from shared dreams and historical research to verify them. Above all was the idea that we transcend our moment in time and the limits of our form, grounded in the discovery that we shared the same dreams.
Third was a mysterious book which appeared on our doorstep during my seventh grade year, bound in leather and hand written in strange inks in Chinese, Japanese, and English, of classical Taoist and Zen poetry annotated as a book of strategy for a game I later discovered was Go, almost certainly written by my teacher of martial and other arts whom I called Sifu Dragon. I began studying with him when I was nine until 1986 when he went into seclusion at the age of 84, and though I had many other teachers he was a second father to me and the poetry he introduced me to remains a primary influence; that summer I went to Japan to walk Basho’s Narrow Road and see where he wrote his poems.
Fourth is Nietzsche’s beautiful epic poem of rebellion against authority, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I adopted in eighth grade as a counter-text to the Bible. It was an unspeakable joy to discover at long last someone who spoke for me, and in my Dutch Reformed Church town lost in time an hour’s drive from San Francisco, ruled by a church allied with the South African Apartheid regime and where I witnessed what I hope was the last witch burning in America as a child, I used to quote Zarathustra to fellow school children who quoted the Bible to me. No gods and no masters, indeed.
Fifth was the poem I recited to my peers at as a Freshman in high school, Invictus by William Ernest Henley. At the first assembly of the new school year members of the incoming class were asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle.
Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
and yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.“
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
Sixth is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, designed as a labyrinth of transformation to forge a new humankind. As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake. In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game. In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions in World War One. Languages are a hobby of mine, and I have tried to inhabit the thoughts of others through their languages wherever I go, though like Joyce I have not yet found the code of meaning which unifies humankind and may be able to help us escape the flags of our skin and the legacies of our history.
If we can call the plain speech of our everyday lives poetry as I learned from my friend Susan Sontag, here I signpost the influence of Shakespeare on my language as I spent most of my Freshman year at university speaking in iambic pentameter, and spent much of the next two summers as an actor at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest half an hour from my home in Sonoma; The Tempest remains my favorite, after Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare I regard now as the Humanist half of modern English with the theocratic tyranny of William Tyndale’s beautiful King James Bible in which I was immersed as a child in a town of people whose mouths were full of thees and thous, and its rhythms and curious turns of phrase have stayed with me.
Last among my influences I count the visionary poetry of Blake, and then Rumi as reimagined by Coleman Barks which was my gateway to scholarship of Sufi poetry as I turned thirty. In Srinagar, Kashmir that was, where I sailed on the Lake of Dreams and was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision.
Here follows my very personal lists of best poetry for American and World literatures; but this is an absurd idea, for a poem which is useful to one person may not be useful to another, and will bear a weight of different dreams, meanings, and values.
Any text, including the stories of our lives, history, memory, identity, is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, ephemeral and in constant and recursive processes of change.
By what possible criteria, then, can we establish normalities and standards which cross the immense boundaries between us to become interfaces?
In this I can speak only to what has been useful to myself in the construction of identity over my lifetime.
Each of us must choose and create such lists of immortal classics and life changing informing and motivating sources.
One might begin such a search from here, with the works which have become truths written into my flesh.
May you discover truths of your own.
My choices for Best Poetry of 2024
Top Doll, Karen McCarthy Woolf
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/140393409-top-doll?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_33
Monster by Dzifa Benson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205518944-monster?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_24
With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127282302-with-my-back-to-the-world?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_26
The Wickedest, Caleb Femi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208668860-the-wickedest?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_9
[…]: Poems, Fady Joudah
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205312834?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_12
Wrong Norma, Anne Carson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175416227-wrong-norma?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_26
Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790715-scattered-snows-to-the-north?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_46
Spectral Evidence: Poems, Gregory Pardlo
Soon and Wholly, Idra Novey
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205646609-soon-and-wholly?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_29
Black Bell, Alison C. Rollins
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/188541721-black-bell?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_31
Best Poetry 2021
Call Us What We Carry, Amanda Gorman African American Lit
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56805404-call-us-what-we-carry
Postcolonial Love Poem (Pulitzer Prize Winner) Natalie Diaz Native American Lit
Sho, Douglas Kearney African American Lit
A Blood Condition, Kayo Chingonyi British Lit
Notes on the Sonnets, Luke Kennard British Lit
Beowulf: a new translation, Maria Dahvana Headley British Lit
Living Weapon: Poems, Rowan Ricardo Phillip African American Lit
The Interim, Wolfgang Hilbig German Lit
Best Poetry 2020
Summer, Ali Smith Britain
The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane America
Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Itō Hiromi Japan
The Perfect Nine, Ngugi wa Thiong’o Africa -Kenya
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz Native American
Tongues of Fire, Sean Hewitt Britain
The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, Ranjit Hoskote India
Best Poetry 2019
Arias, Sharon Olds
The Octopus Museum, Brenda Shaughnessy
An American Sunrise; poems, Joy Harjo
Spring, Ali Smith
Lord of the Butterflies, Andrea Gibson
Soft Science, Franny Choi
Library of Small Catastrophes, Allison Rollins
Indecency, Justin Philip Reed
American Poetry exclusive of that on lists by ethnicity and region
The Language of Life, Bill Moyers ed.
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, Jerome Loving
Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, Jim Perlman (Editor)
Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein
Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Lisa Cole Ruddick
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, James R. Mellow
The Poetry of Robert Frost, Robert Frost, Latham ed
Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson), Emily Dickinson
The Passion of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr
Complete Poems, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition 8 Volume Set (Ronald Schuchard Editor), T.S. Eliot
Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Thomas Howard
T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations), Harold Bloom
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon
The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe
W.H. Auden; poems selected by John Fuller
W.H. Auden: a commentary, John Fuller
Collected Poems, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (Bloom’s Major Poets) Harold Bloom ed
Opus Posthumus, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom
Collected Poems, 1912-1944, Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, Helen in Egypt, Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent, HERmione, Palimpsest, White Rose and the Red, The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, (as Delia Alton), H.D.
The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan
The Dream Songs, John Berryman
A, Complete Short Poetry, Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Bottom: On Shakespeare, Prepositions +: the Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins
The Collected Poems, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
(Karen V. Kukil Editor), Sylvia Plath
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Heather Clark
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll
Selected Poems, 1945–2005, Robert Creely
Collected Poems 1947-1997, Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Deliberate Prose – Essays 1952 to 1995, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, Alan Ginsberg
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan
Revolutionary Letters 50th Anniversary Edition, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Poetry Deal, Diane di Prima
Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, Gary Snyder
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, Diane Ackerman
Selected Poems, Michael McClure
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton: A Biography, Diane Wood Middlebrook
The Maximus Poems, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (George F. Butterick Editor), Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, Charles Olsen
What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The King-Fishers”, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud
The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition, Stephen Fredman
Ground Work I: Before the War, Ground Work II: In the Dark, Selected Poems, Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan
Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Bertholf editor
Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, Peter O’Leary
On Opening the Dreamway, James Hillman
A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985, Wagstaff
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, Michael Duncan
The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, Amy Clampitt
The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1 (1955-1977), Volume 2 (1978-2005), Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, A.R. Ammons
The Collected Poems, New & Selected Essays, Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, Denise Levertov
A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, Donna Hollenberg
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
Hypodermic Light: The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism, Steven Frattali
The Dead and the Living, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Stag’s Leap: Poems, Arias, Sharon Olds
Selected Poems, Robert Bly
Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich
The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly
Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck
The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane
Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015, Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, Patti Smith
Best World Poetry
Germany
The Novices of Sais, Novalis, Paul Klee (Illustrator)
Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche
The Lost Gold of Exploded Stars: complete poems, Georg Trakl
Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, Paul Celan
Conjurations: poems of Sarah Kirsch
Britain & Ireland
The King James Bible, William Tyndale
The Tempest, Midsummer Nights Dream, Shakespeare
Complete Poems and Selected Letters, John Keats
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Khan, Coleridge
Complete William Blake
Lord Byron: The Major Works, McGann ed
John Milton: The Major Works, Goldberg & Orgel eds
Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, James Joyce
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems & Three Plays, Yeats, Rosenthal ed.
Selected Poems, Prose Occasions 1951-2006, Thomas Kinsella
Crow, Tales From Ovid, Cave Birds: an Alchemical Romance, Birthday Letters, Howls & Whispers, Gaudette, The Oresteia, Prometheus on his Crag, Ted Hughes
Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Ali Smith
China
Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po, Li Po, J.P. Seaton
(Translator)
The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Du Fu, David Hinton (Translator)
Eastern Europe
Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, Tristan Tzara
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, Czesław Miłosz
France
The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire
Rimbaud: complete works, Rimbaud, Schmidt ed
Treasures of the Night: collected poems, Jean Genet
Verlaine: Selected Poems
Pierre Reverdy, Caws ed
Selected Writing, Apollonaire
Mallarme: Prose and Poetry, Caws ed
Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char, René Char, Nancy Naomi Carlson (Translator), The Word as Archipelago The Word as Archipelago, René Char, Robert Baker (Translator), Selected Poems, René Char, Mary Ann Caws (Editor)
India
Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, Mīrābāī, Robert Bly & Jane Hirshfield (Translators)
Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, Miller trans
Collected Poems, Jeet Thayil
Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
Islamic Peoples
Concerto al-Quds, Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, Adonis
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Mahmoud Darwish
Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks
The Rub’ai yat of Omar Khayyam, Stubb & Avery eds
Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems, Sholeh Wolpé
The Book of Mansur Hallaj: Selected Poems & The Tawasin, Mansur al-Hallaj,
Paul Smith (Translator)
Iraqi: Selected Poems, Iraqi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Divan of Hafez Shirazi, Hafez, Paul Smith (Translation)
Divan of Sadi, Saadi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Japan
Basho’s Narrow Road, Sato trans
Matsuo Bashō, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Makoto Ueda
The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, Sumita Oyama
River of Stars: Selected Poems, Yosano Akiko
I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda, Momoko Kuroda, Abigail Friedman (Translator)
Jewish People
The Fullness of Time: Poems by Gershom Scholem
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Alter ed
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Poems 1962-2020, Louise Glück
Latin America
Selected Poems, Jorge Borges
Five Decades: 1925-1970, Pablo Neruda
Selected Poems, Octavio Paz
Poems of Cesar Vallejo
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik
Russia
Collected Poetry, Alexander Pushkin
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Scandinavia
Journeys in Dream and Imagination: The Hallucinatory Memoir of a Poet in a Coma, Artur Lundkvist, Carlos Fuentes (Introduction)
Selected Poems, Tomas Transtromer
Spain
The Selected Poems, Federico García Lorca
How I Write
Here’s an example of my three step writing process; record observations, gather intertexts, relevant quotes, associations that spring to mind, and found objects as interpretive tools, assemble like a collage.
I have kept daily journals from my freshman year of high school, which combine drawing and writing and look like a naturalist’s field book or a storyboard for a film, inclusive of travels and dreams; I have also composed using images I create or find modeled on a detective’s forensic crime board. For myself, the relationships between things reveal hidden orders of meaning, taxonomies of being, and hierarchies of value expressed in time.
Collage has been a method and controlling metaphor as an ars poetica for me since childhood, taught to me by my father’s beatnik friend William S. Burroughs along with the Jesuit report dialectical journal form. I constructed an entire wall of my bedroom, originally with images of Hieronymus Bosch art as a ten year old, which I called my Dream Gates wall, portals into other realities; Uncle Bill would add weird characters to it when he visited, and tell stories about them as the fire burned low after dinner and we were swallowed by the gathering darkness.
This became an enthusiasm for Surrealism and the occult as a teenager, Jungian studies and Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology at university, and later my time as a Dream Navigator of the Kagu Vajrayana order of Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal and scholarship of Sufism in Kashmir as a member of the Naqshbandi order.
Herein I attach an example of my writing process which includes ink sketches of a subject, being rabbits observed in the desert south of Tucson Arizona in the mid nineties from horseback, when I worked as a counselor for teenage felons at Vision Quest, things it recalled and inspired, and the final poem.
Torch of Liberty 