Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Tears in my eyes. I love you, Eileen Myles.
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Terreson
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And of course I’m completely thrilled by you mentioning The Book of Frank.

YOU show us and give us the space! I’m grateful for being queer. Queer has been hard. But it’s always getting better. But the real reason I’m grateful for it is because in a way THAT is why I’m a poet, because it’s what I turned to in order to keep on my toes and not fall on my face the way I knew everyone wanted me to. Being queer got me away from the world where I grew up because in the end I had to leave it, it wasn’t going to let me stay if I wanted to and of course all I wanted was to find a loving home. The world couldn’t possibly be better if I hadn’t found poetry for being queer.

Kevin Killian says Hart Crane died so faggots could write poems, and I love Kevin for it, and I guess Crane too, even though I’m not as jacked up on Crane as others.

HERE’S TO the bravery you bring back to poetry! How can we possibly thank you enough for it????
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- Edith Sitwell

“A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity.”

- James Russell Lowell
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By report ancient Irish Ollaves and ancient Welsh Bards, when they met their peers, would enter into and rapartee through poetry. This is the spirit in which I take on GBF’s poetry on a blog.

Upthread someone says that a down thumbing should be taken as a crit of a GBF poem. I say where is the intelligent response in such an anonymous signal? And I question again Harriet’s policy of thumbing up or down. My gut tells me it has led to the dumbing down of conversation.

Also upthread someone has taken GBF to task for being moralistic or for talking down to his poem’s subjects. So wasn’t it Shelley who said poets were the world’s moral legislators? Do I remember this right? And doesn’t everyone else find the Eileen Myles blog to be moralistic, judgemental, and exculionary? I do. So why is GBF getting processed this way for a poem he puts out honestly, not posturing in the way so many poets these days do, when the likes of Ms Myles gets sanctioned?

Terreson
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I don’t blame you for posting your poems on the internet, Gary. I do it too. There’s just an understanding that when you make something public, people have a right to say anything they want about it.

There’s an old saying about heat and kitchens that relates to this.
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“Oh, I would love it if Harriet brought to the blog the central problem poets should be addressing. The earth.”

Well, Harriet may not, but I will:

Ask any fresh new family out here
in their brand new country home,
four bedrooms on an acre, custom
built just for them. They are the
modern and genteel, on the web,
Ipods, cell phones, brand new cars.
Ask them about all these wars, about
these violent, bloodthirsty hordes
who have crossed our history and lands
with genocide and death,
invaded and murdered and conquered,
how almost every nation now was
carved by a nation of invaders.
Ask them about that.
Not me, they’d say… we are civilized…
middle class, good schools, big TV, SUV,
politically correct and morals uncompromised.
We are innocent of such crimes.

And what shock would come to them
in learning of the slaughter
their invasion has produced,
the families sundered,
the infants crushed,
the great communities reduced
as the bulldozers blundered
through tree and brush,
the instant death and flight
of the survivors into the diaspora
of roadkill.

.
Copyright 2008 – SOFTWOOD-Seventy-eight poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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Back at you Rachel. And, of course, your point is likely more important, certainly more poignant. Down here where I live, when driving to and from work in my teeny tiny car, I see these monster SUVs. Frequently, impressionistically I’ll say most regularly, I’ll see this teeny tiny human type animal straining to look over the steering wheel. More than not it is an individual specimen with the XX chromosomal make up. Racial coloration ranges from white, to brown, to black. The sight is always such a turn off to this aging environmentalist. At the sight of these SUVs involuntarily I think of the all the animal life getting wiped out so that that small type human being can feel safe on the road.

On the other hand the stats concerning enclave reentrenchment and environmental adaptation by other animal species give me hope. Coyotes, raccoons, Merlin falcons, and all the way down to the microbial level, animal life either finding enclaves or adapting to even unfriendly urban environments. If adaptation can be taken as a sign of intelligence our species is not scoring so well.

I was once involved in an environmentalist type discussion, brought in as the token poet. I was asked for my opinion on how to save the disaster humans have presented the planet. I said it would be nothing less than a return to the paleolithic level of material culture. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. An ecologist recently said that earth balance can support a human population of 2 billion. So I guess we need to kill off 5 billion people. Like that’s going to happen? And who is going to convince that SUV mom her sense of road safety is diminishing her grandchildrens’ earth? For that matter who is going to convince an NYC poet, a San Fran poet, an L.A. poet, a Boston poet, a Chicago poet, a London poet that their attraction to the happening scene is killing the earth?

“But the longer her hour is poisoned, and therefore the more exhausted by man’s irreligious improvidence the natural resources of soil and sea become, the less merciful will her five-fold mask be…” That is something Robert Graves said back during WW 2. And he was right. Gaia will see to the problem, she is seeing to the problem.

Oh, I would love it if Harriet brought to the blog the central problem poets should be addressing. The earth.

Terreson
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I totally agree.

I’m glad I’m not the only one whose eyebrows raised the roof when the funny girl got the genius grant.
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You paint the picture so clearly (and poetically). I’ve loved all your Harriet posts, and I’m sorry you’re leaving here. But I hope to read more of you in other places.
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I like your theory.

Thanks.
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Very true! But they’re still good for making coffee.
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Gaia is not in danger, Eileen Myles. It is the species that is in danger, ours. She will outlive us in the same way she has outlived all dominating species who get too big for their britches. In the end your words will pass and so will mine. Gaia will still be around even if you and I might find her atmosphere difficult to breathe.

Terreson
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“I’ve been mostly thinking about the earth these days, mostly that she’s a girl, that she’s a poet and one in great danger.”

Thanks, Eileen.
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