I was a poet. This much I knew...all the dirty so-called poets I had left behind in San Francisco were as far away from real heat, real illusion, real rest as possible...here I was with a siren in my lap trying to climb into my throat...God the poets who called themselves poets in San Francisco...I’ve got a rue for you...The rule: Don’t talk. That black social scene of word-smelters, the get-ahead work-a-day martini phantoms...none the BARD, none with the fear and defy quality, none to wonder and escape...”Chase the demons, find the Buddhas”... the School of Poetry is dead...POETRY READINGS are dead wrong...It was rats and monkeys, beefed up with lust, it is the very problem...$ and fame. $ and fame...antidote: NA MWO SYI JI LI TWO YI MENG E LI YE* “I completely bow in worship to ‘I’ the Sagely One.” As far as I knew there were still a dozen real poets living in the Bay Area, and this, the literary West Coast...supposed purgatory of critical and poetic thought! What yak shit, what nonsense...Ah, but it is my problem, my fault, and my bitterness that creates it all. This is really wonderful...when the mind makes discriminations you depart from wisdom...Case in point: fooled again...”What revolt, what disillusionment, what longing! Nothing but crisis, breakdowns, hallucinations, and visions. The foundations of politics, morals, economics, and art--all tremble. The air is full of warnings and prophecies of the debacle to come...” Miller, Rimbaud. The death of poetry. It must live on in the individual...but there are scarce few individuals left...I give up the chase, here and now, give up the eighty one doubts of a career in writing! “Man! Now you’re getting profoundified, now that’s exactly—that’s beautiful.”
Love the wet darkness or get busy leaving, but awaken the great man within from the seat of morbid changes...
-Michael Price
