INVESTIGATIVE POETRY PRIMER
I have found below an extremely cogent and erudite explanation
of the increasingly important phenomenon of Investigative Poetry.
We must never allow government lawyers to dig
with their sharp claws of legal clauses,
in attempts to disbar our bards, without just cause.
Tom Keske (One-Eyed-Private-Eye / Mad Poet)
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http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/sanders.html
from INVESTIGATIVE POETRY:
THE CONTENT OF HISTORY WILL BE POETRY
History-poesy, or investigative poetry, can thrive in our era
because of the implications of a certain poetic insight, that is,
in the implications of the line, "Now is the time for prophecy
without death as a consequence," from Death to Van Gogh's Ear, a
Ginsberg poem from 1958.
Investigative poesy is freed from capitalism, churchism, and
other totalitarianisms; free from racisms, free from allegiance
to napalm-dropping military police states- a poetry adequate to
discharge from its verse-grids the undefiled high energy purely-
distilled verse-frags, using every bardic skill and meter and
method of the last 5 or 6 generations, in order to describe
every aspect (no more secret governments!) of the historical
present, while aiding the future, even placing bard-babble once
again into a role as shaper of the future.
For this is the era of the description of the A ii; the age
wherein a Socrates would have told the judges to take a walk
down vomit alley, and could have lived as an active vehement
leader of the Diogenes Liberation Squadron of Strolling
Troubadors and Muckrakers, till the microbes 'whelmed him. The
era of police-statists punishing citizens for secret
proclivities is over. Blackmail, in other words, is going to go
bye-bye. One will not in any way have to assure one's readers
(to quote, is it Martial, or Catullus?) that "pagina lasciva,
vita proba," but rather it is now most definitely the age of
"pagina lasciva, vita lascivior." And we are here speaking of
uncompunctious conjugation, not of riches cutting up cattle from
silent helicopters, or of bankers whipping each other on yachts.
Thrills course upward from the typewriter keys as my fingers
type the words that say that poets are free from the nets of any
particular verse-form or verse-mind. Keats would have grown old
in such a freedom. The days of bards chanting dactylic
hexameters while strumming the phormingx, or lyre, trying to
please some drooly-lipped war-lord are over, o triumphant
beatnik spores! It's over! And the days of bards trying to
please some CIA-worshipping cold war tough-liberal professor are
done! done! done!
But the way of Historical Poesy, as I said earlier, is mined
with danger, especially to those bards who would seek to drag
the corpses of J.P. Morgan's neo-confederates through the
amphetamine piranha tank. For let us not forget for one
microsecond that the government throughout history has tried to
suppress, stomp down, hinder, or buy off dissident or left-wing
poets.
Nor let us forget that the federal government tried to seize the
first printing of Howl and Other Poems (it was printed abroad by
City Lights) as it was coming into San Francisco bay.
Nor shall we forget the repressive corona of puke-vectors that I
believe drove Shelley?censored, hounded by police-statists,
fearful of arrest?to take upon himself a self-destruction (rest
in peace, o d.a. levy) and to set sail into a mad air; nor
forget ever the corona of puke-vectors that sent the empty
carriages of the rich shuttling along behind the cortege bearing
the body of Byron.4
Nor shall we forget the fate of Ovid, who because that calmed-
down murderer, Augustus, didn't like his book and the
implications of his book Ars Amatoria, was sent away from the
literary scene to die in exile.5
Nor shall we forget that Dostoevsky was standing ready to die in
front of the firing squad when the reprieve arrived enabling him
later on to "objectify" his stance into that of a jealous
rightwing nut.6
Nor shall we forget how the Chilean poet-singer Victor Jara was
leading a group of singers while imprisoned in the soccer
stadium following the 1973 CIA-coup in Chile, and the killers
chopped off his fingers to silence his guitar, and still he lead
the singing- til they killed him, another bard butchered because
of the U.S. secret police.
Nor shall we forget how the Czar's secret police hounded
Alexandr Pushkin with a nightmare of surveillance and exile. In
fact, a brief look at certain aspects of Pushkin's life is here
appropriate, in order to gauge some of the pressures that can
force a poet "to become more objective," or, as the English
professor who writes for a CIA-funded magazine might giggle, "to
come to terms with the harsh facts of life." Or to escape into
the forgetful symbols.
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FOR FURTHER STUDY:
. Naropa University - SWP 2003 - Week One
The theory and practice of Investigative Poetry as it pertains
to extended verse projects involving research and investigation.
Techniques will be explored ...
www.naropa.edu/swp/SWP2003/week12003.html
[Found on Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search]
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http://authorsden.com/visit/viewnews.asp?id=9519
Poetry
Letter eX investigates the MOST WANTED poets in the city of Chicago.
Songs in Red
A Book of Poetry by Kathy Kubik
Reviewed by C. J. Laity
I wait, count grooves
on the ceiling
as shadow puppets
form along streaked green
walls. They turn into clouds
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