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AN OUTLAW POET MANIFESTO
To be one from whose ashes someday truth shall arise -- a troubadour wandering the byways of America, traveling from coast to coast by its railroad tracks and highways, stopping off to recite your poems, to stay with a lover, visit friends--to walk the streets of cities and towns, searching for the ghost of something that may have never been but had only promised to be, and hoping to crystallize this phantom ideal through the power of your language, the sheer force of the rhythm in your heart, fire in your belly, vision in your head; to live broke and unknown but admired by other poets who are equally down and out; to watch others go that same road and come to ruin and yet to courageously continue on your way; to watch the decades pass and others less gifted than you get ahead and yet to pen your words anyway, paint and hang your pictures in empty rooms and sing your song to an audience that at times is no more than just a handful of drunks who are only half listening, and to wake them up, stand them upright, watch their faces brighten and backs straighten and heads lift high because of the hopeful truth of your poems; to need people yet feel eternally a stranger; to try and reach out anyway and, with that painful joy that comes from knowing you are never truly with anyone but your Maker and the wind in the trees; to live as one who believes in such crazy things as Truth and Justice, Dignity and Beauty; to be all this is to be an Outlaw Poet and to live as the Universe intended. And if, my friend, you are such a one anywhere, in any land, a writer in any language who believes in and performs such things, then you too belong to the lyrical brigands who have assembled here. Let us hijack the ship of Poetry and set sail for a new vista, a vastly different horizon than the one looming all around.
What do we see as we pass the coast but the burning neo-fascistic world ruled by Corporations and Gingriches, Gates and Gay Bashers and Paparazzi and child murderers. And over there, in their own sleazy corner, are the cowed arts administrators, the soul's assassins, and those slick editors and producers and huckstering dilettantes and critics who squeeze the life and meaning from American letters by pandering to what is cheap and annihilating about our culture and in ourselves.
This manifesto is a pledge to write poems of profound honesty and passion in the last days of the Twentieth Century; to be poets who share a belief in openness and freedom, excellence and democracy in an era that is without virtue or honor. For us, the new millennium just ahead promises no better than more ruin unless somehow we change for once and all the hearts and minds of the people we live among. This and nothing less must be our purpose.
And yet, in doing so, we should not be just prophets of dishonor, rigidly dogmatic or politically correct, nor permit mere cant to pose as poetry. We must be first and foremost poets who will not compromise our beliefs, our art, and who will continue to act as though our words contain the seeds of change, and in the certain conviction that poets are yet the most dangerous persons in society, the bottom line threat to tyrants and fools.