One Hundred and Fourth Entry

Today's the day of the Dick Pig, so if you don't already know I assume you don't care. Here's some other things that happened today:

Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
Grindhouse opened and I thought it was lame (sight unseen!)


Anyway, Nathan and I are debating poetic process and inspiration and he brought up an interesting point: the elitism of poetry. Though he was using it to describe inspired poems over procedure poems, I think both forms are equally presumptuous, as I think all art is. An artistic statement is, at it's most simple a "look at this!" statement, and believing you the artist have something worth looking at is presumptuous. That is, unless you believe everyone does, which I'm afraid I can't really go along with. Even if I were to believe everyone on this Earth creates art worth looking at, it doesn't mean they do. Also, if I were to be honest with myself, I wouldn't want to see a lot of people's contributions. My personal taste would then dictate what was worth looking at. Wow! The audience member is elitist too!

Even if you work with found art, your perspective, your "hey, look what I found" instinct is what makes it art. And that statement is an elitist one, especially since you believe that your art has value to you, but more than that, that it will be valuable to others. It could be argued (actually it should be argued) that art has worth to the community at large, as the 'antenna' as Pound sort of put it, a force inexplicably tied to the pulse of humanity and thereby a way to come to terms with that which we don't understand: namely, the future. Anything that could really be considered art looks to the future and thereby addresses the foibles of the present. But maybe it's the self-evaluation as an artist that's elitist over the actual art? What do you think?

Everybody come out tonight and party it up.

Here's my poem:

SKATE

My water has a name, and it has a past;
we can walk up the incline and find our car,
cheap wine dribbling from our stupids,
empty car, now it's amazing, we hung around
in the snowbank, I am given scissors
and told to prepare the statue for its destruction.

I kick it off of the mantle. Let's use caps lock here.
Let's find new places to drink that stuff, let's enjoy
the mall, it's our space, clean architecture and fountains,
oh my god you left your diary out now I can read about
the ice, how it hurt the inside of your mouth how
you spit it out. Every single day walking
train tracks, don't lay down for the ants, swing
at the gnats but they don't go away. This summer's
so wintery. Let's do this now. I own
this town, I can't get enough of this coffee.