Trapped Forward

I analyze the words people speak for their quality and content. Over the years words and the silences that preclude them change. Within these words I see keys to open doors to keep ourselves moving. It's like watching a living organism, a tree, twist and turn. Recreating and destroying itself. 

Within the culture history books chant the various and subtle meanings of the changes. Words are my anchors. In America "forward" now is the most popular word in 2011. It was also the Third Reich's favorite word in 1939. It is a word used to escape responsibility for the past. 

Think of all those words and all those languages piled up in warehouses all over the planet completely accessible to everyone now, and what do we have? A world tethered to mediocrity dancing on the strings of vapid commercialism, tone dead to intense fraud whirling inside a circus of money and arms. "I could be found in a nutshell and think myself a king of infinite space," Hamlet said. 

It began when we started listening to our children and hearing wisdom coming from them like the trickling of water, their frequencies tuned to wider bands of godly and ungodly info. Then our politicians seemed to possess a superior knowledge, an awareness of the world we sorely lacked. Our military leaders, resolute, tricky, robotic. We're in awe of their discipline. The really smart ones made tons of cash, and above all there were the internationalists - the first money, the old. 

It is hard to believe families ran such behemoths. Together they control the sky and the lands. What had became of us? Where were we? Trapped in a nutshell.

Unconsciousness of the Community

Modern American poetry begins with Walt Whitman, and evolves through Emily Dickinson and then Ezra Pound, who is the slayer of vestigial forms left over from the 19th century. 

It 's the personal life of the poet and his or her relationship to the present that becomes paramount.  Dante defines poetry as "the melody which most doth draw the sound unto itself," or the unconsciousness of the community. 


Since the Sumerians, through Villon, Cervantes, W.C. Williams, Joyce and Eliot, the soul is journeying to find a home in the Commonplace. That movement coincided with the blooming of the American short story writers - Eudory Welty, Cheever, Salinger, etc.. By 1960 you have an entire canon in place. A major portrait of American society was now complete. It took 50 years.

Hiding Among the Mannequins

I noticed early in my life that people didn't see themselves or others. Inside themselves they hid. 

Others were often seen as superficial or simply fulfilling basic needs. The reason this charade is easy to carry off is obviously everyone is doing it. This approach is grounded in the fear of the Other; one of the first signs of cultural decline.