If You are a Poet Who Asks Permission...

or wants other bloggers to seek your permission for what they write on their blog, then I feel sorry for you. Because, ultimately, you won't be very useful to poetry.

Okay, maybe you will. But you won't be very useful to people.

When I make an aesthetic judgment, I am never making a moral judgment or a judgment on the creator of the art. If I do that, I slipped up and made an ass of myself.

I find that sort of speaking and criticism risible.

I can only feel that I don't like somebody for a short time, before I am embarrassed about not liking them (political figures and Brad Pitt excepted). What vulnerability of mine feels attacked by this person? Is it not ridiculous.

Unless, they're a hater. That's different. Duh.

And when it comes to talking about sex or parodying talking about sex on one's blog....

I don't believe in the transgressive. The transgressive is so over, unless someone invents a new hole or two for the human body. Or if someone invents a new way to destroy the human body that we haven't seen in one of the Saw franchise movies or its million cohorts.

And that thrill--erotic or morbid--would only last a day.

Talking about sex or parodying smut or sleaze is often (for me, anyway) a way of talking about language and power and the ridiculous biological power sex holds over us. The government has nothing on sex. Well, for some people I suppose not. But the rest of us...

Kathy Acker, for example, isn't interesting to me because she is transgressive, but because she is interested in studying the economy of what people call "transgressive" acts, and how this economy plays out. She is interested in who controls the commodities and commodification, and who is expected to be a commodity, and in what circumstances. Some of these transgressive acts are as simple as loving the wrong person (as in Kathy goes to Haiti).

She's also interested in the economy of art, which is similarly ridiculously S&M. Art is the ultimate swing club. Bring your own clean towels. Just don't spray Luminol or that compound which makes semen fluorescent. She captures this brilliantly in Great Expectations, a small masterpiece.

Perhaps blogs should be divided ultimately into two camps, to minimize misery for those who would seek approval and those who would grant approval.

We could call these ORIGINAL and EXTRA CRISPY.

ORIGINAL would be for those blogs which remained true to the etymology of the word as "web log" or diary. These blogs would be diaristic in every sense of the word.

There could be a box you could check on BLOGGER that said "Will this blog embarrass you at times, embarrass you deeply and show you with all your human faults; i.e. will you probably race to erase some posts you have made in astonishing but perhaps totally indiscreet candor? Do you feel somewhat fucked-up and uncontainable at this point in time?"

"Dear diary, I have never felt so (fill-in-the-blank).....in all my life...."

I would check this box for my blog.

And the EXTRA CRISPY blogger would check the box that said, "I am a professional poet (or fill-in-the-blank), and this blog is an extension of my professional life. I may have students or peers for whom deep knowledge of my human faults could be very useful ammunition, and I vow never to disclose anything which will reveal that I am either occasionally or constantly as fucked-up and worried as the rest of you. I am deeply embarrassed by ORIGINAL blogs and feel those bloggers are exploitively playing with their pain. They can't really be that fucked-up or that indiscreet. And if they are, they should KEEP IT TO THEMSELVES."

Obviously, I could not check that box.

And, oddly enough, I can't predict where I will find great art.

Sometimes I find it on ORIGINAL BLOGS and sometimes I find it on EXTRA CRISPY blogs.

It's a mystery. How like art.

Original blogs sometimes feel threatened by extra-crispy blogs, and extra-crispy blogs sometimes feel threatened by original blogs. I have seen diatribes and essays written both ways.

The arguments on both sides, however, tend to share this commonality: 1) somebody is faking something or 2) somebody is perpetrating something.

This is funny. Do these people say the same things when the wind blows and the trees lean, or they hear a rabbit cry when an owl takes it?

Is nature faking something or perpetating something.

Well if it is, then we are natural beings. And if it's not, we are superior to nature, I guess, huh?

Wyrd to your mother. (Nature.)


     --This post is dedicated to Colonel Sanders.