A Poetry of Proximity

"Political"

and

"Documentary"

Poets, as the caretakers of language, if by no other contested purpose of poetry—

✰ to humanize,

✰ to emote,

✰ to demand a “total reaction” as Muriel Rukeyser puts it—

are called upon to respond, to defend their medium.

I want a poetry of proximity

not just by

theme or figure,

metonymy or metaphor,

but by physical proximity, a proximity by frame.

This means allowing into the lyric the multiplicity of languages we are subjected to and create today. The ways in which we measure or create arguments of proximity are the ways in which we enlarge and complicate

the I,

the here,

the we

into ones that reach where our (APPLAUSE) does not, out where we have yet to hear.