In response to the obituary published on January 22nd, 2013 12:06pm

I do believe that we have stumbled upon a corpse.

Poetry is dead.

We are the damned now.

What is there left to say? But

poetry has been dead since the first words were written. We’ve been defiling the poor broken body ever since.

As artists, I think it’s important for us to believe in a microcosm. We need to believe that it is not one bang that makes the world end, but instead merely a whisper. An avalanche being born of straw and camels. That is, we are poets merely because we believe that our medium is loud, but not just loud-louder, louder than ever could be imagined. We believe that all power is derived from the written word and that power is the microcosm of individual lives. That the power of the word is derived from use between disparate individuals and communication between them. What a wonder that anyone ever understands anything anyone says in the first place.

I went to see Angela Davis speak on MLK day. Afterward I was speaking to my best-buddy and awesome creative person, Nola, and her breath told me how antsy she was. How can I go back to doing laundry now that we have heard this woman speak, she told me, how can we keep going having realized how wrong the world is and how much work needs to be done. It’s an impossible question, but it stares like the face of clock across the room and clicks every second. It’s a question that I have to face and we all have to face. Is the art that Nola and I make actually changing anything? Are we screaming in the forest with no one to hear us? Do we actually make sounds?

It’s a terrible predicament. A socially conscious person turns to art as a way of making change but doubts the ability of art to be socially conscious. Or, at the very least, socially relevant. Which brings us to our recently deceased poetry. Alexandra Petri says that “it used to be that if you were young and you wanted to Change Things with your Words, you darted off and wrote poetry somewhere. You got together with friends at cafes and you wrote verses and talked revolution. Now that is the last thing you do.”

I beg her to look closer at those cafes:

I believe that our laundry needs to be done. Our laundry needs to be done because the poems need to be written. And the poems need to be written because they are poems and to hell if they are read or not. Poetry is dead. But we are not. And I can’t think of any better life to live than one that screams violently and perversely loud and does it through any means necessary. There needs to be someone screaming in the world. And that might as well be me. And it might as well be through poetry because it screams loud enough for me in the microcosm.

I believe in the microcosm. I think that that’s enough. If I’m lucky, someone else might scream along with me. Maybe we scream at the same isolated corner of the forest. But maybe someone oddslot else hears and they can do the laundry for someone else and suddenly we are a lot closer to there being no more laundry to do for anyone in the world. Prisons will be converted into mass laundry facilities and we will all bring our clothes to be washed there and we will all scream. Or some of us will. I don’t care if poetry is dead. Let it rot in its grave. I’m much more concerned with the fate of the living.