Seeing these demonstrations, all apart from any question of their political efficacy, is exciting to me, because in '80 & '84 i was involved in protests at the national conventions as a Yippie. (Warning: site takes forever to load.) Even by the Eighties, though, it had become obvious some things had changed irrevocably: the media no longer felt it necessary to pay attention to what was happening in the streets, or else they could feel free to distort it as they liked, because the streets were not a place. Only what was in front of the cameras was a place...

I didn't know Gerald Burns very well, but he lived in Dallas a long time (though he ended up going to Portland to die) & left a deep impression on the people who knew him in the 70's & 80's here. Sometimes i'll be doing something that is like the way he wrote, & then i'll think of him. I much preferred his prose, which was often brilliant, to his poetry, which was usually impenetrable. Here's something i found on the Internet without much trouble:

"So my lecture would be about Games Wlthout Rules, or games which invent
rules as they go to handle things that come up. If you write long-line
poems, where you break the llnes is like that. Why you say what you say
where. Tyrone, who plays darts well, said to me when he s reading a long
thing he always wants to ask what's the point, why don t you get to the
point? I told him my long poem on magic, A Book of Spells, was about-wanted
to render-what it's like to live in a universe in which magic occurs, or in
which it makes sense for it to occur. Writing it took ten years. I had to
wait, I said, for events to occur, perceptions to happen, and wanted it
1,776 llnes long so it really would be living in it, and that, the effect
of that, was its point.

You make up the rules as you go, and forget them as you go on. You make
them up, but you forget them. If someone asks why you did a thing that way,
you can usually say."

And i wrote this elegy:

"Un tombeau pour G.B."

Tiny fires, to carry Ark
We would build, & not three-korn bread.

Dog-in-hand. i remember,
In Austin you read lost words.

Duffers all, Bacon's mitrailleuse
Sen populo...verse toothbrush.

9-1-97


Ella Wheeler Wilcox tells it like it is:

'All Mad

"He is mad as a hare, poor fellow,
And should be in chains," you say.
I have n't a doubt of your statement,
But who is n't mad, I pray?
Why, the world is a great asylum,
And people are all insane,
Gone daft with pleasure or folly,
Or crazed with passion or pain.

The infant who shrieks at a shadow,
The child with his Santa Claus faith,
The woman who worships Dame Fashion,
Each man with his notions of death,
The miser who hoards up his earnings,
The spendthrift who wastes them too soon,
The scholar grown blind in his delving,
The lover who stares at the moon.

The poet who thinks life is a paean,
The cynic who thinks it a fraud,
The youth who goes seeking for pleasure,
The preacher who dares talk of God,
All priests with their creeds and their croaking,
All doubters who dare to deny,
The gay who find aught to wake laughter,
The sad who find aught worth a sigh,

Whoever is downcast or solemn,
Whoever is gleeful and glad,
Are only the dupes of delusion--
We are all of us--all of us mad.'

from Maurine and Other Poems (1888)