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Poetry and Prose for the New Millennium We defy and accept all schools of art We reject and include all styles of poetry We create and destroy all monuments to theory We discard and embrace all forms of writing We invite and betray all habitation and name We worship and blaspheme all theories of literature We are not exclusively stand-up poets or maverick writers, feminist writers or gay & lesbian poets, language or neo-narrative poets & writers. We are not exclusively African-, Latino-, Asian-, Native, or any other hyphenated American writers, but all and one of the same. We are not exclusively confessional poets & writers, nor new formalists, imagists, symbolists, surrealists, modern/post modernists, political-post-ists, post avant-garde-ists, pre- or post- raphalite-modernists. We partake of all and exclude none. We are not New York writers, nor L.A. poets. We are not Seattle writers nor Portland writers, Southern poets, mid-western poets, northwestern poets, South-North-Eastern Western Transatlantic Oceanus Islander poets. We are poets and writers who live in the world; we write about the world, whether that world be the corner of Vicksburg and Hartley in Diamond Back Illinois or the corner of Tuscon and Tierra del Fuego on Planet Earth. We are not urban poets & writers; we are not rural poets & writers. We are not proletarian poets; we are not court apologists. We speak no one's mind and no one's heart but the heart and mind of the collective. Yet, we care not a whit for the collective;we elevate the individual, the collective be damned. We contradict ourselves. We sound our barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. We are poets and writers of the 21st Century. We celebrate a cleansing away of all the soot of 20th Century industrial theoretical pollution- while we embrace every one of its dark particles. We are poets of transformation and rigidity. We proclaim the manifest destiny of the pen and the hand and the computer and the sentence and the name and face. We protest and we burn, we assemble and we build. We look to the East as well as the West. We gaze to the North as well as to the South. We are the dissipative structures of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We oscillate from Being to Becoming, from Becoming to Being. We sleep with chaos. We dance with tradition. We garden with the flesh. We landscape with the mind. We open with the arm. We close with the eye. We resuscitate with the mouth. We grasp with the heart. We reach with the soul, the brave old soul of this brave new world. |
