Join Along with Me as I Revise Atheists and Empty Spaces

Those of you who regularly read my blog are aware that Austin Macauley publishers has decided to abandon the rights to publish my book Atheists and Empty Spaces on July 27. They say that sales were too low on the book while they did absolutely nothing to help me promote or advertise the book. So be it! Their editors, whose names I am not going to look up, made a mess of my book anyway. In their final edit, they removed 15 to 25 lines of poetry. LINES OF POETRY. Any idiot knows you cannot do that without substantially changing the poems those lines inhabited. Atheists and Empty Spaces contains much of the best poetry I've written in my life. It is a significant book of poetry. Anyway, I am not aggravated. I am past aggravation. I am working toward resolution--and resurrection.

The good news is that I can now revise my book as I see fit--change it drastically as a matter of fact--and make it read and look that way that I would have it read and look. It will be my work and solely my work without nitwits tampering with it, removing words and lines.

Today, as I was revising, I thought, "Why not let my readers join me as I revise the poems?" Many of you have probably not read Atheists and Empty Spaces. You cannot buy the former #1 book in religious and inspirational poetry on Amazon after Sunday (I do have at least five copies, maybe more!), but guess what? You can read each part of it as I revise it.

Now, here is the the deal. WIX limits the amount of posts that I can make to social media sites, so I can't post all of the poems' revisions to Facebook. However, I can make as many blogs as I want. You can read every blog as long as you keep the connection to it. So...

Make sure to check on the blog every couple of days to see what I have revised! I will post every revision of every poem.

Today, I have the NEW foreword, very similar to the old one, and a couple of the poems revised. Introduction has been changed drastically. Atheists and Empty Spaces is not revised quite as much as Introduction, but I have made several word and rhyme changes.

Oh, one other thing about this version. I am not including footnotes and endnotes. If you want to know what the foreword or a poem is about, I guess you will have to email and ask me (mbt1966@yahoo.com). I am providing no access into my personal thoughts on each poem in the book.

As always, ENJOY!

The Promises That I Keep

(A Foreword)

What author is there who, when looking at a text containing various portions of her or his life’s works, considers the words written therein to be the vision she or he intended to reveal to fellow humans?  I ask, is there such a person? Authors often pretend to know the meaning of their works and will quite as often defend what they have written either as youthful naiveté, religious superstition, or personal mythmaking. They tend to think that they have presented what they believe as fact or what they perceive as an authentic idea that can be understood as truth to people with similar intellectual capabilities and socio-mythical views.  However, authors must realize that meaning will be conceded to readers, and, as their own readers, they are the first to notice a failure to convey even the most basic of concepts.  They know, as all wise people know, that the interpretation of a work is not misled by dumb luck or an errant stroke of fate but that these interpretations are distorted by the author’s immutable decisions.  The most problematic of these binding decisions lies in word choice because it is in the selection of a word that most authors’ revelations fail.

Words, their usages, and their arrangements are peculiar memes that have nothing in common with the natural relationship, cultural understanding, or social interaction that they are meant to represent, and a dictionary definition of a word hardly gives context for a reliable connection.  Any author knew the word when she wrote it, but the word warped because she chose a word.  Words organized into phrases and clauses exaggerate the vulnerability of word choice even further.  Each word confined within a phrase or clause is naked before chilly gusts of misinterpretation but finds no protection surrounded by others of its kind. Conversations about or written analyses of an author’s work as an attempted confirmation of an unbiased vision or a balanced revelation of an author’s vision push the reality of her life and the honesty of her imagination into the fabricated and chaotic realms of nonsense.  What author, no matter how hard she has tried, can present an untouched reflection of the world and her interactions and relationships with the things in it?  After all is said and done, the essence of art is only smoke, color, and warp of memory, perception, and vision (past, present, and future) presented in vapid, ever-morphing words, words that can never be trusted to explain anything to anyone.

            All art fails to satisfy the deepest desires of humanity because it cannot answer the two basic questions of human existence: What does my life mean? --and--What happens when I die?  Those who seek the answers to these two questions in art are making the same regretful decisions that the artist who attempts to answer them makes because no reflection can answer these questions.  Art does not answer such questions of ultimate truth. It only exposes superficially tiny truths and seldom even does that well. In the same manner, art does not give wisdom though it may expose folly, art does not dole out pleasure, but it may feed discomfort, and art cannot deliver happiness though it may inspire a profound sadness. While it may never grant its purveyors ecstatic joy, art can be a symptom but never the cause of bottomless grief. Art is sober, and it is violent, but it is always reflection and never the original experience.

A reader says, “This poet’s work has caused in me sincere change” but had it not been this work, it would have been another, for this reader was looking for an experience that suited an inner desire for change. Change is necessary for growth. Change is necessary for enlightenment. Now, change is the mantra for poetry.  “Make it new” cried Ezra Pound in the 1920’s, stealing the phrase directly from the ancient Chinese texts he was studying. Therefore, poetry must change or try to change though it will fail to do so. It must change what it is about or not about, how it is formed or remains formless, what words it must use or may not use, and who can or cannot read it though it will fail. Poetry must become philosophical change, it must become social change, it must become cultural change, it must become political change, and it must become identity change, or it will fail. Poetry became the elitist and intellectual property of the university and the doctoral critic, and it did fail. It became the enigmatic typewriters of a million monkeys pounding out their versions of King Lear in formulaically incestuous poetry workshops, and it did fail. Poetry became the diaries of eight-year-olds on Twitter and Instagram, giving what I have been assured is immeasurable pleasure to the masses of poetry lovers everywhere, and it continues to fail miserably. Poetry, through all this change and failure to change, has become enlightened and enlightening. More people are writing it, more people are reading it, and more poetry books are being sold than ever before in the history of the art, yet Poetry continues to fail. Hooray for Poetry and its changes! Hooray for Poetry’s failure!

In all this outside-of-the-box revolution, I see no flicker of incandescence guiding me through the dim-witted conversion or through the darkness of poetry’s transformation and its failure to transform. The candle blew out, but the light bulb to replace it never came on. I, the simple maker of songs who uses words that you know and live with but do not know how to say, see no illumination. I am stuck here in the dark.

I see no enlightened change for me because I never needed to change. I am always and only here to express the idea which is often thought. I cannot shift to a new thought but only repeat a thought that has been thought a million times before and millions of times afterward. You know this thought. It imagines your life not mine. I only use the words of the thought because, maybe, I know the words. Maybe, I know the words better than most people. Maybe, I know the long history of the words and the thoughts and the people, and the words and the thoughts are part of the people that I know. I know how to arrange and rearrange the words to be about your thoughts. What I think is never about me, so I do not need to change. I can stay the same while you change, and I reflect your changes back to you in words and rhythms with which you are familiar. I am a simple maker of the songs that you have known since ancient times but have forgotten how to sing.

I am always and only here to express your song in a way so that you say, “Yes, that is what I thought.” This saying tells me that you are enlightened, but I cannot be enlightened by my own words. I can read Homer, Sappho, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Byron, Tennyson, Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Bishop and say, “Yes, that is what I thought.” It is not a new expression but a thought that has been expressed a million times and will be expressed a million more times. It dreams my life not theirs. I am inspired by their expressions, but I do not live their lives. I do not write their words but words very like theirs. I cannot see that words unlike theirs make anything new. I write inspired, or I do not write well. I do not write new. I am a simple maker of the songs that they have known since ancient times and continue to sing.

I do not have any answers to the two big questions, so I do not try to answer them, and even where I carefully or accidentally instigate change, it is painfully obvious that I am a fellow seeker who wrestles, like Jacob, with vague truths that I cannot hold, truths that both curse and bless me.  My reflections, no matter how original in their distortions, are irrelevant if they do not articulate the same thoughts as my fellow seekers and if they do not use the same expressions as my predecessors. “Make it new!” is old and tired and wrong. It is the wrong words. It is the wrong songs. It is the exasperated expression of Poetry’s failure.

            However, this wrongness is the same thought and the same expression that is found in all the symbolic portrayals of human failure.  This failure is an old condition. This failure is a noble condition.  The very essence of Greek tragedy is centered upon human failure whether the struggle against this failure is noble or not--and Shakespeare, the thought of Western thought, still has the market garnered on human failure.  His gigantic portrayals of human failure cannot be superseded. From King Lear to Hamlet, no author’s characters have failed so well.  However, we, the most recent modern Western artists, have taken the portrayal of failure one step past Shakespeare’s nightmares.  We are no longer content in giving our characters calamitous faults.  We no longer relegate human failure to the mishap of sightless reflection and wretched fiction.  We bring our failure from within ourselves and are doomed to poetic abortion before we can begin our exhibition because of the fatal idea that we can successfully present ourselves as new characters in new situations represented in new modes of expression.  We want to be the original and authentic characters of our inept plays and the clueless subjects of our hopeless poems, but we are not original and genuine individuals.  We are overshadowed by the failure of MacBeth and Othello, so we do not create anything new at all.  We merely mock and then slander someone else’s creation that became modern humans. “Make it new!” Pshaw! We would need something besides words and thoughts to explicate ourselves from this tragic and utter failure and create something new.

            The appropriate course of action following such a broad and startling claim seems to be to brace this hypothesis with various and sundry literary examples.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Indeed, the study of the literary arts by over-eager theorists with no real sense of art is the main reason for the contemporary dabbler’s inability to be a real poet.  This failure was not possible before the 19^th Century and the systematic studying of literature because literature’s disciples at that time were all readers.  When literature’s disciples apply themselves to an artist’s work, they are reading.  They criticize and analyze a work based on the aesthetic and intellectual values found within the work itself. They do not need to see or hear what Professor Blotto has written or said about the work or what he says about the life of the artist. Disciples do not care to know which        -ism the work fits into as if isms are as useful an organizational tool as alphabetizing or paginating. When we, as post-critics, use these disciples’ written applications to approach an artist’s work and to attempt a final decision on the poet’s meaning or a poem’s value, we are not reading; the sacred and fundamental bond between the literary artist and her or his audience is broken. We become drone-like thinkers in cults of personalities, and every poem, short story, novel, and play becomes a school of thought, and no individual thought is left to be experienced as an isolated, imaginative and co-creative event.  With every critic and every school of thought, the value of an artist’s work comes to an end for the studying-but-not-reading reader and potential artist, and as Emerson said, “They pin me (the reader and artist) down.”

We can only have a Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, or Blake in a world without literature students and without schools of literary criticism.  Art--and especially poetry--needs pious, isolated, and individual converts to its religion, not congregations of prying critics.  Poetry needs silent and solitary creative disciples not schools of wisdom-seeking students.   As readers, we must let the artist lead us, as Virgil led Dante, to the places we all must go, but we cannot so much as offer a single course or bearing upon the path, and we cannot go in large and clumsy groups.  Sheer numbers cannot protect us from the evils and entanglements of a thorny literary work, but they can and do distract us and encumber us with the weight of their collective dullness.  Poets are just as guilty of the herd mentality as any literary scholar and, in this attempt to get everyone to believe what we believe, we all fail.  In mentioning certain literary names to bolster my hypothesis, I have suggested a particular and well-worn path, and thus, I have failed. Please feel free to return to the paragraph that begins “However, this wrongness is the same thought and the same expression that is found in all of the symbolic portrayals of human failure.” I hope that you do not find yourself in a continuous circuit. Once you understand that art is about the failure to provide anything but reflection, inspiration, or creation, you may proceed.

            The piles and piles of wood pulp and electronic bytes praising the works of the modern and postmodern author have never raised his or her effort to the level of poetry or art.  When we place the modern or postmodern author upon a pedestal, how is it that we do not know that the likeness will sink into the fermenting mulch and digital abyss and rust, rot, or be lost on the infinite server?  Most modern writers have already drowned in the flood of ink used to comment upon their foundering works.  They are studied and interpreted, but they are not read. Only a few modern artists remain afloat in the stormy Sea of Ink, their highlighter-riddled, anthology-laden vessels in danger of being swamped at any moment.  Most contemporary poets are praised, praised, praised on blogs, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites designed to present their divine inspirations in the context of secret insecurities and personal tragedies, which are made social and public for unacquainted, potential neophytes. Worshipped like technological Tennysons, they spend more time proclaiming the profundity of their idylls than giving them any depth of thought, clarity of rhythm, and acuity in word choice. They will not drown in these shallow Seas of Praise, but they will be trapped, like Heraclitus, beneath the mounds of manure spread over them and die of suffocation without being studied or interpreted because they smell so bad. None are new; none are original.  The one difference between them and the poets and artists in the past, present, and future is that they will have never been read. They may be studied, they may be interpreted, and they may be worshipped, but they will never be read. In this, they have already failed, but, trust me, their failure is no Shakespearean tragedy.

            Since my words are doomed to fail and never present the vision, revelation, and reflection that I intended, why do I continue to write?  Since I cannot advise anyone about big truths or tiny, superficial truths, why do I continue to write? Since poetry seems destined, perhaps even doomed, to change and to fail, and I cannot find anything in the past, present, or future to arrest this change or failure even within myself, why do I continue to write?  Since I cannot escape the times and could only ever be studied and interpreted by critics, post-critic readers, or worshippers or not read at all, why do I even bother to write?

I do have the answer to these questions. I write because I can keep a promise that I once made, and although I have long since forgotten to whom I made the promise, I promised that I would always write words in a poetic form that maintains a connection to song and the rhythms of my breathing. I promised that I would remain a priest to the fickle divinity of poetry to whom devotion earns little but trouble and lost time (Baudelaire). It is what I do, so I will write. I will write poetry. Promise kept.

Introduction

(In the manner of Blake)

Out in the woods with pen in hand,

I sat beneath a Dogwood tree

When suddenly, a naked man

Appeared and made requests of me.

“Write a verse about Mankind

And I will tell you what is wrong.”

And scarcely had it left my mind

When he cried out, “Those Lines are much too long.”

So, I scratched out a word or two

To show him that I made good sport.

“My god,” he sighed, “What’s wrong with you?

This poem is too short.”

“Start over with the words, ‘He was,’

And end it with the words, ‘He died,’

And in the middle say, ‘Because

He dreamed, He was not satisfied.’”

His censure froze my supple heart.

I tucked my pen beneath a stone.

I told him that we too must part,

And then I left the woods alone.

Atheists and Empty Spaces

We have no more hallowed places,

Empty spaces, or penitent faces.

The bees who buzz in winding races

Through petal, pistil, style, and stem

Have no fond memories of Him.

All we know is the diurnal traces

Through which the sun ceaselessly crawls,

Low, swollen, drowsy, and faceless,

Forming and stretching cold shadows

Over our constant, divisive races.

In Sol’s myth, all dreamy and dim,

Live no fond memories of Him.

Whipping through the empty spaces,

Flinging off its double faces

Like autumn leaves in windy places,

Anima imagines boundless mazes

And pushes ever-changing sexes

Through the many mythic phases

Of the ancient goddesses’ whim.

She has no fond memories of Him.

Now, fallen idols fill our faith

With noiseless, tasteless, empty space

While acid tears flow down the face

Of awe expressed in Christian arts.

Theatrics and aesthetics! No!

Anesthetics sooth unloving hearts.

Pagan gods carved in marble parts

Deny the loss of face and limb.

They have no fond memories of Him.

When Hours comes to steal our places,

When Days desire empty spaces,

And Years transform into bony faces,

June bugs dodging bobbing daisies

Will declare the human race is crazy

To ape the insect’s mazy flight.

Good sense sits on a soulless limb

And has no fond memories of Him.

We know no more hallowed places

Except in those empty spaces

Where thoughtless creatures buzz and crawl

Through the simpers of atheist faces

While petals, pistils, styles, and stems

Still have no fond memories of Him.