Champion Poets

Commentary on Poetry: I don’t want to be like Robert Penn Warren, or W.B. Yeats, I like their poetry, but it ends there. Neither do I want to be like Allen Ginsberg, or William Burroughs, all good poets in their own way. Rather I prefer to join the ranks of the naturalness, spontaneity, free from rhymed couplets, romanticism, passion, Buddha, and leave the Elizabethans, to themselves. I prefer to shift a bit to the 11th century, or just before that era, when rhyme was becoming modernized, but not quite in place. Right there, there was a world of nature and mysteries and emotions to be written, told, and stories to be handed down, and memorized: addressing the times, its cultures, and heroes; and so I must take that period, with my era, and mix it with fragments and dreams, and all such things, and let the dead bury the dead. Let the artificial reproduce half the literature (they will anyway) and my kind the other half. It can be hard to live in a world where critics who write mostly criticism, discard themes, dignity, manners, this perhaps is a strong protest against all such things, but poets must reassert their right to represent the world, in a clear and genuine tone, it is our duty. We are only passing through, we leave behind what we write (we infect minds, or produce wholesomeness), the irate citizens will always get their full of whatever, but those who wish not to have their pockets picked, wait on us to circulate literature that is filled with swimming thoughts of such things I’ve already mentioned. And to these readers, and the generations to come, I write. (1-3-2008)