Although getting poems rejected is not as much fun as having them accepted, it was lovely to recieve a really kind rejection from G C Waldrep of West Branch.

Prose No Muse

For me, the crucial issue is not what can be done to change the status quo but, rather, to look intensely, meditate majorly, on what is so appealing about it. I don’t think the status quo is sufficiently understood by some whom critique it or, perhaps more accurately, imagine they do. I’d prefer one explores, sees emergent, how interred one is, and to think with ridiculous distance about whether one would like to embark on exploration yields new pleasures, new comforts so primary they’re almost natural, and in not quite being so are the more powerful. This stance, too true, may not afford hope adequate to sustaining any endeavor the status quo doesn’t sanction, and surely replacing its pleasures would raise maximal ire. It is so difficult to depart from status and be correct enough; nor is it sufficient to declare incorrect far more valid than previously established: flipping does not, necessarily, alter the stuff of very sentience; instead, it highlights the same old material a little differently. A little difference is not a bad aim. Most authority is insufficient. I’d be surprised if, were this state altered, satisfaction would soar. Kindness and dumbness have a relation to each other but I’m not, currently, sure what it is; no, I insufficiently am!

Prose, to me, connotes authority to such a degree that it becomes denotative. As someone who is massively suspicious of my own authority, prose thus becomes a somewhat absurd endeavor. I cannot end an argument, or even necessarily adequately support one. I am likely to start with one stance, and end with belief in its opposition. In my hands, argument is wrecked, made amorphous, no, jelly, jiggly stagnancy whose slops and winks, wee shocks and shiftings, make hallucinating going anywhere possible.

Yes, my interest in prose is at odds with my philosophy of power so, astride a deliciously cynical logic as topos, that renders mine dumb. This, almost comically, makes revelatory sense: I am keenly invested in faith that theoretically unsavory demographics are often no more possessed ponk than any other community once one adjusts for magnified visibility due to comparatively small size or, conversely, darn near invisibility due to hugeness; and of course, and of course that phrase is wildly frustrating, everyplace in between is crucial. Poles ably morph into polarities; I’d rather live in cosmopolitan country. Is it just me or does diaspora make more sense as a concept than community. I’m craving closeness.

Poetry, for me, is a matter of riding a language stream, an energy, a tidal rivulet; prose requires me to think more than perceive. I am not markedly good at thinking. Mostly I’m so focused on why my ideas are inadequate that this unconfident stance thickly scrims getting to any point I imagine could hit a chord with many others. I’m not cut out for self-defense and it’s precisely there that I imagine making significant points. Why I’d jeopardize what I imagine could be a strength is not even a question I entertain. Moreover, strength is nothing if not indefinite when it comes to its article. And underneath all this hoobla there’s undoubtedly self, matrix, defense, blank point whose chiasmus does not demonstrate equivalence nor support the thesis that equivocation is an outmoded model for what’s assumed to be happening. How I can even dare the word happening is ripe for wonder. I insistently don’t supply concrete examples. I do not bolster my prosy chunks with quotations. This manner could be determined to be egregiously egotistical. My fantasy is that this method (grandiose term!) investigates so much knowledge or, rather, the frequent condition of knowledge: devoid proof, citation.