poems section context

  Posted on September 18, 2014 at 10:54 pm

The poems section isn’t intended to reveal the secret genius I’ve kept from you for decades. It isn’t to show the arc of my legacy in superior volume. It isn’t living under the assumption that because I wrote it, you should bow before my awesome. I imagine that there will be many poems in this section that you will not love. My fragile ego is worried that there will be many that you don’t even like. Fuck my fragile ego. I want to show every beginning writer that regardless how their work is judged now, that it can grow beyond their critics’ expectations. I want to post all of the writing I had to do in order to understand my voice. I want the audience to experience how many shitty poems it may take to get there. How many lines of fear are jotted before freedom. How many presentations must be exhausted before tasting the truth. How through all of the failures of self & writing in the process, that the core is always present, waiting to be unleashed. The poems in this section need to be bad to prove history. They need to be redundant to show how we keep returning to the scene of the crime until we can grasp the scope of the situation. They need to break all pre-conceived public ideas of me as a poet, if I’m to grow into the poet I look up to in my dreams. The poems section is not about preference or value comparison. It is a glimpse into the narrative often lost in the product of art. It is a realm where the 17yr old & the 38yr old are equal. It is the space where the poems are waiting for you to explore depths beyond how well they’re written.