UC Irvine

People don’t write abstracts about poetry collections because it is a ridiculous thing to do. What would be the point? I could theorize and analyze the themes, subjects, sounds, meanings of the poems, I could turn them over and roll them into flattened pieces, take samples of them and burn them under the magnifying glass until they’re shriveled up raisin-versions of themselves. Theory kills poems. The university loves theory, because the university lives in its own clean reality where everyone thinks the same and talks the same and who needs poetry in a reality of sameness? Poetry is dirty and doesn’t belong to the university. Artists hide in the university and pretend its boring, oh-so-very-righteous ideas have any relevance in the actual world so that they can get some crumbs of the university’s money. But the university can’t kill the artist. Only the artist can kill the artist. And the university is becoming more and more dead, irrelevant. Information is everywhere and it doesn’t cost $50,000 or $80,000 or even $126,000, except for in the university. We have gotten ourselves caught in an absurd trap here, haven’t we? We pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hide in the university so we can get some little crumbs and come out with a paper that declares we too can talk and think like everybody else at the university. Something is being dragged out of the world by a giant fishing line, something bright that we need. I write poems to try and bring it back. Anyway, thank you for your time. I hope you can spend the rest of this day thinking your own way.