To Friends Who Write

Dear Friends (You Know Who You Are),

...in search of recognition...in a world where your work is a "one in many" "face in the midst of the crowd" "still small voice"...you are lost.  In what flows from hot to cold to make engines turn, we are the dissipate leavings.

And it's not surprising, but surely dispiriting.  As I looked at your poems I grew more impressed, more interested.  That is the best I can say.  And the best, really, I think I can do, is to be an eager reader...waiting and wanting more from you. 

That is what I want in a reader...well, just that A READER.  That is the "community" we want.  Appreciation from one reader...and then one more, and then another, and then...well you see the problem.

Imagine...I am only now waking up to Williams as a man of fierce intelligence but also of fierce ambition and fierce need.

As I hold Williams-as-written in my mind, in my ears, in my hands (tangible love) I realize that publishing in 1920 is STILL small.  Still a community.  Still easily divided among small numbers of writers we label members of "schools."  There are poets, great and good, who just want to be loved (and hated) by one another and to stand in time next to other names.  To be named!  And also, bed Mina Loy...who deserves so much more than that from me here now...but there it is.

We have no more great poets because the acquisitive mind has co-opted the world and poetry is CONTENT--and content, really, turns out to be irrelevant.  And that is a warp and weft of its own devising.  Realizing that poets both love and hate Williams, that the public knows one poem and makes gleeful "get it" fun out of another; realizing that the world does not know any of Williams really as you can't know the wheelbarrow outside of its home in its book where it carries a quantity of uncertainty as payload.

As I hold Williams I hold a book Spring and All that is nearly 100 years old.  This corresponds with Williams holding onto Shelley's Triumph of Life.  Or even my holding onto Auroras of Autumn like Williams holding onto the 1850 Prelude or the barbaric Leaves of Grass.  Who is the Ashbery who springs into life at the death of Stevens?  Who is that Ashbery?  He seems volcanic of the undigested being, but who am I to judge?  What is true is that monuments are made while moments are lost.  

We have exploded and are only pieces, are one in pieces, unbounded in our bond.

Trunks like Shelley like Whitman are surely only branches though with great circumference.  You and I are nearly forced to be the ideas of leaves hoping to bud into existence on a fruitful fruiting branch not fruited.  Still to grow juicy and even sweet which is a product of dry seasons so we may fall in the autumn and be usefully dead for the great continuing Yggdrasil.

Or something like that...something more than paper recycled for bodily use.

But if so so.

As ever, your friend,
One/Many

A Business Wholly Mistaken

Charles Koch spouting nonsense in the WSJ today:

Years of tremendous overspending by federal, state and local governments have brought us face-to-face with an economic crisis. Federal spending will total at least $3.8 trillion this year—double what it was 10 years ago. And unlike in 2001, when there was a small federal surplus, this year's projected budget deficit is more than $1.6 trillion.

I'm not saying this is true or false--just that it's "only" rhetoric for the WSJ audience and it's nonsense...first of all, what is "overspending" in this context? Why do we spend and why are there deficits? Here's the simplest formulation I know: Governments spend on what is "necessary" to uphold the duty of Provision for the citizenry. Governments, to balance this needful spending must take in money in the form of taxes. Without appropriate taxation we fall into deficits.

There are any number of arguments for and against taxation and what indeed is "necessary" spending. There are any number of arguments for and against government period. (That government which governs least is best--right, Henry?)

However, people like Charles Koch argue from a particular motivation and it's not one that includes the welfare of the "common man" (unless he considers himself common). Let me reiterate that there are no "free markets" and all things become "cronyism" when the Capitalist amasses enough wealth to buy the officials. In reality, most of us today NEED our government to protect us from the "free market" that wants to take everything we have from us.

Digby has a fine post discussing/dissecting this opinion piece.

Whitman, from Democratic Vistas, again in Crase, I think speaking to the Tea Party mentality that the Koch's cultivate to their benefit:

The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort--a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth....So that, from another point of view, ungracious as it may sound, and a paradox after what we have been saying, democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the ignorant, and on those out of business. She asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank--and with some cravings for literature, too; and must have them, and hastens to make them.[my bold]

Perhaps, though, it's better to think of each and every single one of us in this way:

The whole object of the universe to us is the formation of character. If you think you came into being for the purpose of taking an important part in the administration of events, to guard a province of the moral creation from ruin, and that its salvation hangs on the success of your single arm, you have wholly mistaken your business. (Emerson, Journals 1828)