Having received, by now, enough messages to kill a horse, I wanted to just make a public statement here on what goes on/went on/with Jess and the people who message me about him.

While one never has to choose to be on a website or to do this or that, I am particularly happy that I chose to be on Neopoet, despite the petty chain mail going around now. Jess has moods like all of us do, but of course I won't sponsor any abusive comments towards anyone of any gender. That's my "stance" on it. If this site is "male dominated" as I've also heard from women here, let's go ahead and bring more women in. I will help with this myself. But this sneakiness, this pettiness...

This is a microcosm of a bigger picture. While there's infighting here because of a problem--and infighting amongst such intelligent people--angling for power with the varied forms of identity politics
does nothing but weaken "tolerant, liberal" people. The really intolerant and inauthentic people (maybe the people who voted for Donald Trump) take this as a game to watch from afar and occasionally take advantage (pretending to agree, pretending to be "part of the dialogue") and the rest of the nonsense.

It does not matter what rings you wear in your nose, or how stylish and well adapted to the times your politics are; that is a matter of adaptation to everyday life which requires no sacrifice; the people who would see no use in poetry are winning (and have been) and in very big numbers because of this incestuous, disgusting infighting.

There are no safe spaces. Boundaries are routinely violated just because of the nature of daily life, though of course these are noble aspirations. The underlying spirit of poetry is a spirit of *revolt*, not acquiescence to the way things are, even with the growth of MFA programs and assorted fetid vegetation. (That's a topic on its own: the last thing I wanted to do when I left school was to go back to school to be sold fucking textbooks on how to write according to *this* expert on blackness, whiteness, whatever; that's them getting into your head, not you thinking your own thoughts and developing naturally.)

It would seem, though, that we love our power schemes and little beautifully melodramatic arguments which we *have* to win, incidentally --even on a relatively modest, and tranquil website like Neopoet--more than we like the prospect of victory on a larger scale. And this is exactly the kind of behavior which elects Donald Trump and his abominable oligarchical next cousins again and again; unguarded, naive liberalism. Fascism, the underlying Geist of this present age, is *actually* the polar opposite of poetry; if for some perverse reason identity politique liberals WANT to experience it, it won't be enjoyable or chic when you get there.

Is there any material spirit of insurrection even left, now that we've become so comfortable and homogenized? Anything that transcends the ridiculously overinflated ivy towers so full of masturbatory overanalysis of the slightest infirmity or discomfort. If not, poets like Leonora Carrington, Rimbaud, Lecomte, Emily Dickinson all lived in vain.

I'd like to thank everyone for reading my rant; though I think it has more of a spirit than most rants, though not entirely devoid, maybe, of pathos..

Neopoet is like Cape Cod to me.

"We will end roasted by our manmade suns." David Gascoyne. ???