Seika - A Poet's Manifesto lyrics

"We" the poets who a**emble at open mikes and coffee houses belong to no esthetic camp. We are untrained in our academics and I doubt that any one of us knows the difference between Cohen or Ginsberg. All of us have come to read our poetry with the usual meandering, untrained, picked up on our own, night school cla** understanding. Some of us got our training in how to write at university newspapers, by putting together reports, or editing wacko newsletters for radical organizations or just curled up naked on a mattress coming down from a buzz. All of us writing crazily in a notebook without a single hope that someday...someone would read it. Some of us have been self published or legitimately published but that hasn't helped create the kind of work that would sing to a generation of kids who hang in gangs for excitement, or bring a thrilled audience of poets to their feet on a Friday night. We've acquired our material through living, and our sense of form from filling out endless job applications in a depressed economy. We've acquired our styles from writing letters to family and friends back home. Mailed from apartment house slums in cities full of furious, pleading, cunning manipulators looking for a hand-out. Our ability to be savvy comes out of having to con for a meal, make ends meet with the good old welfare check or hustle for a place to crash in an urban wilderness. Pastoral elegy just doesn't express what we've felt as we lay on emergency room tables waiting to have our gun shot and rape wounds treated. Our poetry is comprised of immense and universal suffering, something far beyond the teachings of an academy. Our poetry is filled with beauty and anguish like the mad and vibrant colors of Salvador Dali, a new kind of expressionism. What ever training we do have, and what ever sk**s we've acquired have been honed on the sharp edges of desperation. Our poems come literally from the bottom of our souls. Experience their editor, truth their evolution. They emerge with rage, love, a heap of explosive subjects, filled with the rap of every cheap, stupid, vile, and impossible influence apparent in today's media, greeting cards, MTV, tabloid rags, right down to Today's Horoscope. All this mixed with influences glimpsed while browsing through books we can never afford to buy. Books written by Baudelaire, Poe, Shakespeare, Ginsberg, Patchen, Baraka, you name it. Standing there reading alone, unknown and transfixed in the bookstore aisles. Around us an entire town or city. But, who out there in this crazy cauldron wants to listen to what we have to say. With a poet, a microphone and an audience, magic can happens....It's all HOWL. Back in the 50's and 60's it only took one poet to write a testament. Today we need to hear from a whole nation. A brand new battery of poets. A collective HOWL ... so to speak. The poet generation of the nineties that will lead us into the new millennium.