So lately I’ve been trying to focus on propagating and really explaining just a few core ideas that I have. One of them is Open Source Emergency Response. Another is the idea that journalists are our poets.
Since my late teens, I have identified myself as an American Poet. It has been a central point of my identity. Jonny Stepping and I spent a lot of the 1990s trying to break me into the pop culture world as the Worldwide Entertainment Juggernaut of the 21st Century. We were less than successful.
I used to get so excited when poetry made mainstream pushes. There were many. The MTV Spoken Word series was one. The huge and cyclical popularity of poetry slams. The yearly crush in the Living sections of all newspapers to publish some "The Beat Goes On" article in April for National Poetry Month: Etc.
None of this ever cut my way. By "my way" I mean toward entertaining, contemplative, and literary works. It all seems to cut toward shrill, angry, cadence-crazed, and marginalized.
All the while, I tend toward the papers. And I see amazing stories written by my heroes. Masterpieces composed in the afternoon sun-downing deadline-time in the vein of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. Relevant, useful, lasting prose that moves me.
I never go to poetry readings. I never read any new books of American poetry. But I am consuming the best poets in American literature by reading the papers daily.