En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir.

This has always been a notebook. I’m done, but I’ll tinker and add poems to Toward an Anti-Capitalist Poetry. I’ll keep on posting translations, all of which eventually will be moved to a proper website, where they’ll be available for free in various formats to anybody with internet access. Maybe I’ll self-publish a few things on paper, here and there.

Unasked-for advice to young poets: My friend Kent Johnson recently summed it up quite beautifully in his Thirty Three Rules of Poetry for Poets Twenty Three and Under, but I can add the following.

If you have real talent, certain older poets will try to glom on to you. Sometimes they genuinely want to help you develop your poetry or get your stuff to readers; often enough, they’re fishing for acolytes or vampirizing your youth, energy and ideas. Be friendly, but be careful, and don’t let anybody tell you what poetry is or what your poetry ought to be: that’s for you to decide. Be tough about it. Be even more tough on yourself.

Poetry is individualistic (we tend to see it as property — even when poets collaborate, they generally take great pains to make sure everyone knows who wrote what, which defeats the purpose of collaboration). But language is collective, or it dies. If you ponder this contradiction for the rest of your life, it’ll do your poetry immeasurable good, but remember that reformist anodynes disguised as literary criticism are cold comfort and transform nothing in the long run. Remember that “cultural capital” is a confused and distracting fiction.

Don’t be satisfied with what you’re taught in school. Avoid poetry organizations. Avoid professionalism. Bureaucracies demand strict adherence to mediocrity and can’t help but take themselves too seriously. Even the most apparently egalitarian associations can and very often do ossify very quickly into bureaucracies.

Try to understand the difference between “man-rage” and class rage. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to tell the difference. I’m definitely one to know...

Never stop struggling. Art’s all about struggle and always has been.

Even the most “transgressive” “libertarian” “hipsters” are too blandly conformist, too incapable of sustained attention, too shut off from themselves and others. Avoid them like the plague. Trying to be “cool” will make an idiot of you. Avoid TV as much as possible.

Language can be used to build or destroy solidarity. The links farther down on the right side of this page lead to a number of excellent writings that will help you understand the importance of solidarity and will help you think about how to use language to build solidarity.

Read Wittgenstein and Celan, but temper your mind with the classics of radical thought, past and present (see links). Don’t mince words. When people have no way to answer you, they’ll call you a bully, opinionated, incapable of comprehending literary theory, whatever. Poets are no more capable of self-insight, no less prone to emotional and intellectual cowardice than anyone else.

1) Language poetry was an outwardly tightly-organized, quasi-elitist, definitively vanguardist social movement within US poetry that fell apart under the weight of its own contradictions and the overweening ambition of a few poets who pretended to be egalitarian. They achieved their goal, which was token acceptance by a few critics (most notably the wealthy reactionary, Marjorie Perloff), a job here and there and a few rotten scraps of influence over a small group of acolytes suffering from ahistorical delusions of avant-garde grandeur.
      If that’s what you want, go for it.
2) Flarf will never “end” because too many of the flarfistes are at best mildly talented poets with very little knowledge of poetry, history or politics. Their basic misreading of a poem by Yeats proves their ignorance. Their recent apologetics for racism (talk about intellectual incompetence!) at various blogs prove their inability to perceive one of the most fundamental aspects of our culture.
      Most of the flarfistes are capable only of producing flarf, which is, all things considered and often enough, a somewhat subtilized form of minstrelsy. Too many poets wish to be poets without struggling with poetry. Too many poets who like to think of themselves as radical will never face their own wholly conditioned assumptions.
      If you think that wriggling through one reactionary position after another in defense of your own ignorance is a sign of intelligence, go for it. If you’re incapable of admitting you’ve been wrong or have made glaring mistakes; if you’re so arrogantly assured of your own theoretical infallibility that you’re incapable of apologizing for being a reactionary asshole, even if you didn’t realize it, go fuck yourself.

The Democratic Party won’t save you. They want to continue the imperialist slaughter abroad and preserve capitalism here in the US. Suss it out. Get ready to resist the draft. Eventually, our ruling elite’s (Democrat and Republican) grotesque, century-old, ever-brutal “foreign policy” will blossom into World War III. You better fucking well believe it.

When misery overwhelms your heart, as inevitably it will, don’t run from it. Find a way to use it. Be open. Be completely generous. Demand complete generosity in return. Make mistakes. Suffer and rage. Rejoice and love. Work hard. Play as seriously as a child. Talk about it, think about it all the time. Have a sense of humor about yourself. Be honest. That’s how people grow.

Commit lèse majesté often and with implacable glee.

— begun on May Day, 2006