gatekeepers, soul-reavers

Reading this morning: I skip the front matter—a treatise about quintessential american literature of the 20^th century: a who what where when why analysis, thoughts on thought, compare/contrast, what is art and who is an artist and what is craft and why it matters (it doesn’t). I always skip the introduction because, to put it frankly, I don’t care.

Last night, I watched my aging dog paw at the splotchy rug; once golden, now white tufts of fur sprouting above his eyes. Nostalgia, a bittersweet longing tugged at my chest as I recalled the day a little mangy stray ball of golden fur stumbled into our lives. Flea-ridden and tick-bitten. We learned how to re-trust the world together. My dog is a time-lord, no one knows what his age really is—just spotty guessing. I stroke his back – golden, white streaks counting time passed down the center. A poignant moment born from a glance; strange and striking beauty.

What I’m saying is we see, read, hear, feel, experience beauty, terror, despair, longing with every type of art. We don’t need someone with a PhD to tell us how we should feel about a poem, or a painting, or a moment. We know how we feel about it; we understand it; we experience it—it’s ours now. Not theirs.

I believed for too long that everyone else knew what was best for me. But these discordant seasons taught me that I could survive—that I could trust myself again. The academic fruits I longed for, grasped for, contorted myself to reach fifteen years ago have gone to rot in my esteem. I want to experience all the art love pain joy despair fear peace turmoil and I want to experience it myself.

All this is to say, I skip introductions.

ENGL 2150: Intermediate Creative Writing – Poetry
E.B. Tatum

A poem is not a diary heads hang groaning into graphite palms
pleading to please professors prophesying an end to postmodernism
Craftless craft is no craft to call / We write in iambs or nothing at all
Clockwise counter ticks toward me; Stand & Deliver Real Poetry:

Colors swirling in a vortex as cars speed down the highway
Devil behind the wheel looks at me and says,
you think you got it tough?
sounds vibrate through my brain: hot, then cold
shapes melt past the windows: loud, then soft
We race on toward the great nothing—A black hole at the end of the road
the Devil’s mistress back in Hell 
with purple kush, a cat
and an eccentric bleeding from his chest—
Fuck Art

They blink

Talking heads shake: An intangible meaningless unmetered mess and nod: Derivative uncultured prose at best

As if, at nineteen, sitting in an air-conditioned room inside a brick building that looks like the brick building which looks like the brick building modeled after the brick building like that other brick building during a sweltering afternoon in the middle of a Texas heat wave, as if I balance the world-soul on the tip of my pen, 
and I just
dropped it

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I appreciate all of your support from reading to comments to tips and everything in between. Thank you for accompanying me on my journey.