Russ Bowden placed the following note on Facebook regarding a Newsweek article concerning the alleged decline of poetry:

The article is called, "The End of Verse?" Here's an excerpt: "Yet according to the NEA report, in 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months. That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years."

I tried to respond to Russ' note in the comment section on FB but couldn't fit what I wanted to say in the alloted space, so I'll rewrite it here:

I think Michael Polick, in his response to the Newseek article to which Russ's note was linked, made the right point, at least when it comes to the U.S.: "I believe many of the problems facing the contemporary poetry scene are self-inflicted." . . . I agree. Consequently, I don't think the question about poetry being dead is very relevant. It's too general. Dead to whom, where, in what languages, etc.? If we're talking about the U.S., poetry certainly doesn't seem too dead when it comes to net sites, slams, hip-hop/rap culture, etc. The more official insitutionalized poetry world, the one housed primarily in the academic world and the more established "small" presses, well that's a different matter. Although the individuals who play the most important roles within this poetry milieu are seriously committed to poetry, their equal commitment to the academic poetry world's infrastructure, I think, is pretty self-defeating. That's because its primary goal isn't reaching out to non-academic people but rather expanding itself as a corporate subdivision of an increasingly corporate academe. This means churning out MFAs, getting the MFA holders jobs, making sure the MFA holders have books and - in essence - making the poetry establishment self-perpetuating, not in the sense of stirring up constant storms of creativity but in the sense of making it technocratically efficient. The things that often attract people to poetry along with its artisticness - things like social significance, the smell of daily life, accessible statements that seem to make sense in terms of the problems we all face - these things, although discussed alot by the existing poetry authorities, aren't discussed by them in ways that make much of an impression on anybody. Even this, however, doesn't mean poetry's dead in the U.S. It just means a lot of readers find many of the current academic-based poetry boring. But that's only one division of the contemporary poetry world. For this much at least we're lucky.

Sajitha Gouwry, An Artist To Be Reckoned With

To check out Sajitha Gouwry's website and art catalogue click here - Stree, Tracing 20 Years

Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Installations, Text and More

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Archetype Series, 2008

Note After Midnight
for Ahmed Dahbur

In the headlights, a heavy rain washes dirt
down the embankment into the cracked driveway.
The parked car’s engine runs. The overhead lamp
is on.

Behind the steering wheel, I read your words:
“I pursue a black rose growing in my heart “
and
“I saw a bomb walking on hindlegs in the capitals of the ebbing Arab tide.”

The rain beats the car’s roof.
Like a refugee’s garbled code, the sound
sends a chill through us all.

Inside your existence, your friend with a notebook disappears.
Somehow, thousands of miles away, he kisses the back
of my hand, leaving his bloody lip prints there.
Children with explosives tied to their bellies
blow up in our mouths months later
when we speak on the phone through a translator.

In the rained on car, I look at my hands.

It doesn’t matter
that in our dreams, nothing stolen is returned.
Not one grape to one vine.
Not the robbed sound of feet fleeing in Fakhani and the camps.
Not the smell of stewed vegetables or the home
years ago
in which they were cooked long before knowing got jailed for vagrancy.

Why should it matter? It’s only a phase.

Throat sounds that mean nothing now
will one day be words for things
that language can’t stomach yet.

If possible, your poems will be even stronger then!

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Revision of previous draft. Earlier version published in Abalone Moon a few years back.

Shetkari Chi Bhakari
for Narayan Atiwadkar

I don’t think
the turnip sprout knows, nor
the coriander leaf, nor
the paddy in spite of its

having witnessed
the perfect
spread of the white egret’s wings --

I don’t think they realize that
the phrase “a farmer’s bhakari”
had to be the name you gave

your book, the peasants
using it to mean
a basic, necessary knowledge, a bread

unlike any other, shaped
by hand without any reference to
the unseen. & so

because of such nourishment
eventually there springs
forth, as if
in a field east of Hindalga Rd., a seedling

of mental sight that can’t be
bought or sold at a university but that appears

apparently out of nowhere
only to those who prepare
the ground well.

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-- Revised / original draft February 2008, Belgaum Dist., Karnataka

Four Pieces re: the Prophetic Arts
for a. j.

1. Adaption of Early Buddhist Sutra (from Samyutta Nikaya)

A sack of skin and bones, understanding
that the body is itself the mind, concentrates
on one aim, knowing, and only then
does it enter
the sacred trance-state,
that form of focus which, hunted
by the true wisdom-wanter, is itself the liberation
it was evolved
to achieve --
consequently, this method, which
in order to find one must follow
many knowledge-paths
into difficult places, is considered
those paths’ blessing.

2. Epistemology

beetle eats through
rose leaf

light burns holes in
white-mist
mind

these
passageways

3. Graffitti Apotheosis

I spraypaint on the boarded up window
a picture of the boarded up window.

4. Random

At the East Road Bar, the lead singer’s spittle
drips radiantly from the mic.
Strips of ceiling paint curl downward
like thoughts slowly peeling away from the mind.
Inside the music: roaring
silences, deathly quiet sounds.

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-- The above poem is a revision of a previously posted draft.

excerpt from unfinished essay

With its emphasis on rhythm and flow, voice and counter-voice, writing is a form of music composition.

As such, writing long ago reached the point where transcending traditional notions of melody was necessary in order to discover better (i.e., more comprehensive) musics.

The challenge is to unleash . . .

Click page 2 below to read the rest of the excerpt.

Pages: 1 2

_{Graffitti decal/poster . . . Ornette & the Whirlwind: 50th Anniversary of His Album, The Shape of Jazz to Come / 13" x 18"}

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Slanted red text above says:

Ornette memorized the whirlwind's 50-year-long song
& played it in a state of ecstatic indignation & God didn't dare to interfere

Black as snowflakes, gray as sunshine

I hear a violin
not a normal one
not one with a bow that skates across the strings, crossing & crisscrossing
all the way
to Harmony, South Dakota

No, this violin, whoever’s playing it, is almost unlistenable, a racket of scratchings
its strings are antelope bones, ones
a lion's claws rip clean
& then later when you look down into
the crevices in the cracked bones
what you see
(mysteriously)
are little lambs scooting this way then that, each of them knowing
this is no time to lie down
with a lion no matter what the do-gooders say

O’s playing his violin 1965
& for the first time the bum kicking over a trashcan in an alley better copyright the noise he’s created or else
O will find the jazz in it & make it
all his own

revised

(the unknown messenger)

Would I or wouldn’t I weep in the shadows
of stone churches for a dream
of dead beauty?
Here’s St. Anthony’s. Here’s . . .
The question is itself the answer. Don’t be afraid
of the passage from
dusk to night, that healing.
The gone soul reappears as taillights
on 4th and Union.
I walk through the Italian section on the west side of town.
Televisions inside the windows.
In an alley
meaning’s fragments spraypainted on a wall.
Holding a bag of raw meat, I approach yards.
Dogs grow calm.
I look up, blessed by the stars.
At daybreak, I return to my house.