The first thing you read in Naked Parrot, before Part 1 and before the dedication, is a poem called The Manifesto. Here it is.
I want my poems to be bloody, dangerous like raw chicken, chaotic, full of errors/errorful— there’s a certain celebration in contractions and deviations and unnecessary articles/images that depart like a sunken vessel from the craft of Good Poetry— antiseptic rhyme organized by line, so I can maybe develop my Poetics of Sin, because I’ll tell you this: my poems get worse with revision— I don’t want to be anthologized or studied or employed at the University/professional hell and I sure as shit don’t want to talk to a room of you about any of this, like a fraudster—instead why don’t we just settle in, skim the milk for the frothy glue of a good line turned sideways and just for once in our lives let these poems fucking be.
Why start here?
A manifesto is supposed to be a list of demands. This one is mostly a list of things I don’t want, and it gets pretty specific by the time it reaches the University/professional hell. It’s basically a warning label. If you get to “raw chicken” and hate it, you probably have your answer about the next two hundred pages.
For the record, I hate it too. I left “dangerous like raw chicken” in there precisely because I don’t like it.
What’s a Poetics of Sin?
Raw chicken isn’t the only thing I left in on purpose. In my last post I mentioned the typos. This is the poem that explains why, or at least the poem that makes it sound like a principle instead of laziness (it might just be laziness): “my poems / get worse with revision.” I believe that about some of them. Others I revised for years.
Look at the slashes, too: “errors/errorful,” “articles/images,” “University/professional.” If you read the last post, you’ve seen me capitalize things when I’m making fun of them, like Real Book and Serious Writer. Good Poetry gets the same treatment here, and so does the University.
Who’s the fraudster?
“I sure as shit / don’t want to talk to a room / of you about any of this, / like a fraudster.”
I spent eight years teaching at the University of Nevada, Reno, and five more at West Tallahatchie High School in Mississippi. That’s a lot of rooms and a lot of poems. I know how it goes: you take something that hit you in the gut and you explain it until it’s a worksheet. The poem doesn’t trust that job much, and I’m the guy who did it for thirteen years.
Can we just let these poems be?
If I could only keep one part of it, it’d be the ending: “just for once / in our lives let these poems / fucking be.”
The Manifesto opens Naked Parrot, out now in paperback, hardcover and Kindle. Read more about the book, buy it on Amazon, or read Why I self-published Naked Parrot.
