A Call to Action: Write the best poetry and give it freely

As seen in the journal Alternate Route, Issue 13, Spring 2024


Some poets pull from the minutiae of daily life. Other poets pull from their guts, seeking a pairing in the outside world – trying for a conduit between microbiome and biome, between enteric mind and visible matter. 

The truth is there's plenty of bad poetry passed as good poetry. Bad poetry is all or mostly in the conscious, while good poetry is rooted in the subconscious. Good poetry is plentiful but it can also frustrate when it allows the subconscious to rise only for the conscious to tamp it back down with the fury of a scholar who must translate fecundity into a solo language – table for one.

Then there’s the poetry neither good nor bad in which the subconscious mind spins and reigns with libertine license – a grin turned sideways and used in place of the letter C.

The best poetry, however, fuses the conscious and subconscious in a balanced flow of geometry and spindrift from flexed muscle. It is the subconscious mind allowed to rise, and it is the conscious mind allowed to truly write what can rightly be called poetry.

But even the best poetry is paltry when it's the work of isolationists and exhibitionists. As indigenous people have long pointed out: How can you truly own and sell the air, the wind, and the water? And how can you truly own and sell the land that we're made of and that we return to when we die? So on the same thought, how can anyone truly own the poetry you inhale, and how can you truly own the poetry you exhale? 

Why limit poetry to formal readings and to open mics and to journals and presses offering their authoritative stamp on your name? Why write poetry to create and comb the fine hairs of industry, even if that industry is just the exchange of poems for prestige and for the glory of a bio boasting a listicle of publications justifying your name?

Why not write the best poetry? Why not let poetry be the breath it has never ceased to be without inflated interference choking it away? Why not put poetry in the correspondence between us – a warm handshake in thought and an embrace in words? Why not give a glimpse of your gut just as I’ve given you a glimpse of mine?

Yes, why not read below? And why not respond with pride dropped to the sewer and with intellectual property returned to the life from which you took it?

Indeed, why not let go?

–

THE OPENING

Do me a favor and remember: in what room were you born? In a hospital room? In a living room? In a forest unhindered?

Now put yourself there. Tell me what you see. Tell me what you feel – tell me everything. 

–

Now put yourself in that same room and hold yourself in suspense. 

Let yourself fall through the floor and keep yourself falling, floor by floor – keep falling, keep falling, even if you must break through the floor of the earth.

Keep falling…

Now tell me what you see. Tell me what you feel – without hesitation and without doubt, please, tell me everything.

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