The Promised Land Project: The Perfect Wave Project: Doing the Poet's Job Collectively

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Friday, December 10, 2010

The Perfect Wave Project: Doing the Poet's Job Collectively

While I pass no judgments of what art should or should not be – art can be various things to various people – I do believe in greater possibilities of what art can be. In her introduction to Ellen Bass's wonderful book of poems, Mules of Love, the poet Dorianne Laux writes as follows about the poet's job:

What is the poet's job but to help us to become aware of life's transience, love's power, the subtle manifestations of hope, to play for us again the ancient themes.

I'm suggesting here that we can better do the poet's job through a collective approach rather than individually, recognizing the limitations of the art form. But I expect it would have to start within the circles of poetry, as the writer Henry Miller asserted: