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If Leaves of Grass was published in 2024, its varied editions would have one or two reviews and it would be buried in the capitalist infinity of Amazon’s search pages and no one would give a shit.
Oh Walt Whitman — the bearded wanderer who set the American poet on their journey to craft their own poetry pantheon— but so much has happened since then. Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the Confessional poets, fucking Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, poetry slams, Under St. Mark’s Theatre, City Lights, Rupi Kaur— I can keep it going but I promised myself that this substack wasn’t going to be some five thousand word behemoth but you get what I mean right? The 20th century completely defined American poetics and our current generation will no doubt do the same. With each new addition to the American poetry conversation— the style, scope, and depth of the whole thing is effected much like anything else in the arts— it’s how any human endeavor works— the construct is a sum of the many parts and it snowballs and contorts to fit the aesthetic and cultural values of the time. SO NOW THAT WE’RE CLEAR.
When the Renaissance started kicking off I took two years off of submitting to mags or publishing anything just to put my full focus into building and organizing— but during that time I had a moment to step back and reflect on what a poem was or rather— what a poem was in this current era. Was a poem black text on some online website? Was it merely a post in some Bukowski bro Facebook group? Or did it have to be printed? Was it a poem if the black ink wasn’t just on the webpage but inked into real dead tree? Was it a poem if I showed no one at all? What about if there was no written poem? If it only existed in voice and my own subconscious? If I never read it in front of anyone at all or never once thought to write it down?
My friends and I weren’t like the other poets that were running around who were so stiff you could knock em over like cardboard cutouts — nah man, we felt like we were the last of the hardcore. While most poets would be quietly reading their poems waiting for golf claps and celebrating the evening with cheese and wine discussing the latest lit bullshit.
That is not how we functioned in the poetry world— we were wilding out and doing whatever we wanted to wherever we went and just grabbing a fistful of America— packing out venues and romping around the city or taking off for sudden adventures through the Missouri woodlands or trying to fight the audience (Manchester I’m sorry) what I’m trying to say was that our experience was not orthodox by any means. It was and still is completely opposite of most poets experiences. Everywhere I went I never knew where I was going and most of the time I didn’t even have ten bucks in my pocket. No university sponsored tours or corporate backing — just bohemian & ash jumping into another adventure hoping the ghosts of poesy would guide me to soft ground.
That’s when it occurred to us that something had shifted and we were at some weird forefront of a new style of poetics. We were the poem. Fuck all that twentieth century shit we were moving past that— Millennials were here to ruin another industry and it was the pretentious poet archetype that we had in our crosshairs. The 21st century had reinterpreted the poem and it was now us, the poet and if we were in fact the poem then that meant everything we did by extension was poetry. Ya dig?
We were the byproduct of reality television and late-stage everything— the result of bringing confessional poetry to its zenith and breaking any notion of speaker or separating the art from the artist. It was a new day. The memes, the shows, the adventures, the life in and of itself was all the poem and we lived like maniacs just to get the tone right. It was the most natural progression and one that will without a doubt piss off the poetry establishment. It’s a pure American innovation taking unbridled individualism and bringing the poet forward as a direct instrument not just of writing poems but of living them.
This is the shape of poetry to come and whether you’re ready or not— it’s coming to a city near you.
If you dig this than subscribe and share it so we can keep shaking up the elitist poetry establishment. If you really dig it you can support on my Kofi or Venmo/ PayPal: @damianrucci