while one who sings with his tongue on fire
                                gargles in the rat race choir
                        bent out of shape from society's pliers
                                cares not to come up any higher
                        but rather get you down in the hole that he's in

                                 from 'it's alright, ma (I'm only bleeding)', Bob Dylan

            A few months ago, I promised that I was on the verge of publishing, and I am. But I find that closing the cycle of work that I intend to publish has proved to be a more drawn out affair than I had intended. But close it I must before I begin. Why, you ask? Well, funny you should ask, but the answer is simple enough. The truth is I have already published a large body of work, although you won't find it listed in Bowker. And I'm not talking about this blog. I used to joke that I 'was famous long ago / for playing the electric violin / on desolation row', aka, I was a poet in Philadelphia twenty-five years ago. I published on the wind, in the living breath of the spoken word. But, when you understand that poetry is a chain of voices, the wind is enough.
            But what I learned then is what Dylan was teaching in the early to mid-60s, when he was the voice of that prophet, also crying in the wind. Dylan and Ginsberg, as much as I rail on the latter now, taught me that being a poet was possible in 1955 or 1963 or any other year for that matter. Poetry is up next to your ear and directly in front of your eyeball on any given day, in any given hour. This very minute, it stands on you doorstep, 'in the clothes you once wore', and rings your doorbell.
            But who's listening?
            Not the children of this age.

            I'm grateful that I stood at a microphone in that golden hour of the spoken word before the hip-hop demons decimated the field with the endless anger that only leads back to the place of addiction from whence it arises. We spoke with anger as well, the angry knowledge of a culture that despises poetry because it reminds us of what might have been and how it should be. It reminds us that life is not about your car and your cozy nest and the nine to five grind of stupidity that puts those idiot necessities on your table. Because there is one larger necessity that is altogether missing here. And it's not your latest love affair, and not the evanescent sex dream that has replaced any semblance of real love in this drained and demented culture.
            But the draining dementia has driven into the sacred realm of poetry as well. This is what I learned twenty-five years ago. I stepped out into the public light because I had finally found the key I needed to write the poetry that spoke my truth. But what I found when I got into that light was a host of struggling children, children who had heard a brief word from the inert stones at the altar or glimpsed a momentary flash from the goddess. Everybody has two good poems. The seduction is overwhelming.
            But the mire is wide and deep.
            And what I found is that the poison of the mire is nothing to the poison of those who have become trapped in it and are slowly sinking into their house in the suburbs, their comfortable cars with the self-heating seats, their endless empty love affairs and the slow death of that fragrant moment of talent.
            And the worst are those who have committed themselves to the life of poetry without the willingness and the courage to follow their own instincts, who defer to the herd and write in the common voice.

            Undoubtedly, there are those who will accuse me here of purple prose. But purple prose is the only alternative to tears. When I remember the level of talent that I saw a quarter century ago, and how I witnessed that talent, more than partially realized, gradually debased and dispersed on the effluvium of what passes for critically accepted poetry, I have to go back to the kitchen and look up at the hill. Even in its barren splendor in winter, it is more comforting than the memory.
            And then I remember the price I paid for befriending these half-formed poets, the endless sideways attacks that I had to endure. Worst were the stalker style responses, the empty phone ringing, the multiplying modes of harassment verging on the criminal. Meanwhile, one hears a ceaseless whispering rustle in the background, which, when one catches a phrase or two, proves to be savage, slanderous gossip, self-justified under the aegis of 'helping poor Jeremy'. Yes, helping poor, deluded Jeremy, who still believes that poetry is somehow attached to the gift of song and the music of the language, and not to some modernist horsetail, filthy with excreta. Yes, poor Jeremy, foolish enough to believe that poetry, precisely, is outside the 'mainstream', and that poets are a special fraternity, a unique band of brothers and sisters in a tradition outside the mainstream.
            Those one or two poems - how they seduced me. I had to learn that an intuitive voice is not necessarily the sign of an ear. And that even an ear is not a sign of understanding. Finally, I grasped the level of self-doubt I was dealing with. One literally has to defy the culture from top to bottom to insist that beauty is still the basis of art. With the concept of beauty - particularly among 'artists' - reduced to what Henry Miller called 'that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America', it is not surprising that artists have no clue where to find true beauty. So the late Victorian pseudo-beauty becomes the anti-object everyone steps on. But the horsetail, the real horsetail, filled with ungroomed shit, would have more beauty than this flatbread made out of mud that passes for poetry today. A cryptic piece of prose, flattened beyond all speech, chopped into shorter or longer lines, no matter how suggestive or ambivalent, is not a poem.
            There is no doubt that prosody has changed. But this is the clue, both the key and the gate. While modernism was falling down, English prosody was changing radically. The two events are related, but they are not the same. English prosody has become 'Americanized'. But that means, as best I can gather, that the new prosody will resemble the classical Greek, where the rhythmic alteration in the prosodic structure itself becomes the defining characteristic of poetry. The foot is dead - that is, the traditional repetitive foot of English language meter - not because of modernism, but because of a shift in language. In American language, quantity is at least as important as stress.
            The false prosody of modern poetry is an aborted attempt to mate the traditional prosody with an essentially false or self-conscious idea of contemporary speech, the denatured consequence of the transition into modernism itself. And this has become the universal test, the universal rule of thumb, for contemporary 'critically acceptable' poetry. In short, the whole critical structure has gone south.
            But a conscious, technical understanding of prosody cannot produce poetry. As Pound said, without the music, no poetry.
            So it is not surprising that the contemporary poets cannot rise into song. And, 'bent out of shape by society's pliers', it is not surprising if they try to 'get you down in the hole' that they're in.