The Greatest Living Poet Project is the result of a profound dissatisfaction with current poetics and current poetic style. The project believes that it has found a better representation of the modern world and the people living in the world. We find no contradiction between the necessity for the sublime in art and the necessities of modern life. Our stock in trade is a sublime that is achievable and consistent with modern English usage, never using an artificial or an "elevated" language. Since the sublime - or the "unknown quantity" - eludes all rational analysis, our poetics are identified with a mental alchemy, which makes the poet a creator analogous to god.

As I have an interest only in the "unknown quantity" of miraculous language, my work is sustained by a faith that the entire universe is a living being containing within it a living soul. The universe is a living creature, with direction and purpose: love. This is a dynamic that gives vitality to art - not using rational, minimalist prose in place of charged language. I think we want only so much rationality to keep us secure and fed, then we want to return to the "unknown quantity" of magic worlds. This is the only communication the universe soul understands. The ultimate realities of the human condition are nurtured by this active, living conversation between the images of this living spirit and our daily lives. People are told they seek happiness, but I know they seek the "unknown quantity" of life. We want magic, not solvency.

The Greatest Living Poet Project insists that the sublime in art exits and resides in a sinuously indirect statement rather than in direct proposition. We have a renewed interest in the irrational and in the marvelous. We don't need to talk about automobile mufflers to represent people living in a city.The poet in society represents a direct link to the world soul. This world soul sustains what is human and material. Technology does not sustain the first movers. The world soul does not value current technologies of mufflers anymore than an older poetics took note of the ways women maintain their hygiene in their toilet. The world soul does not reckon - is not offended or helped - by the technologies of transportation, hygiene or computers. We are highly mobile metaphysical beings, not material humans trapped in a technologically amusing birdcage. Humans are not identified by their technologies, but by what they focus on. We are like gods, with the powers of gods; our language and imagination make us supreme masters of our environment and every earthly reality. The "unknown quantity" we seek in language can only be performed by poets who follow the irregular rather than the regular - no matter down which rabbit hole. A god awaits us there.

In practical terms the Greatest Living Poet Project insists upon actively re-engaging an interactive public. The means of gathering a public is through pleasure, not by finely teased argument. The poetic presented in this school can instantly be recognized by its emphasis on the power of individual line and phrase. In our poetic, each poem must contain lines that implant memory, set up tents in the human imagination, make camps in our daily lives. First lines always signal the power of this school. The first line may as well be the entire poem - so strategic is that moment in the relationship with the reader.

Our poetic is a power in the universe - not a self-indulgent rehearsal of prosaic sentiments, political polemics, or poets in search of more competitive resumes. I do not care if I ever see another list of small press awards and small press credits. In our projects there are no more workshops for people to learn how to write better poetry. There is no workbook for our poems. Our words are incantations and charms. We have all heard of academic poets who list credits of 12 books published and still remain unremarked by a wider public. This is a failure of modern poetics. Poems should be Monads: the world - our experience of the world - represented and compressed into one symbol, one line, six or seven words, embedded in the texture, implanted in the brain. Only poetry can do this.

Poetry is like a shout - it never unfolds in stages. It is an event itself. As I said earlier, the only task for a poet is to master the unaccountable. Again, what we seek is the "unknown quantity" of language, and the only field of play for this language is the Greatest Living Poets project.

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The GLP Project: What is Poetry?

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