Getting Down to the Silent Place
There are writers who write about global events, movements and sweeping trends, important stuff, and this makes them important writers, the ones with book contracts who give lectures and appear on talk shows. But what they write about, really, is a hodgepodge of consequences, the results of starved awareness, a plethora of disappointment and after-the-fact facts embedded in a deep ignorance of the truly important stuff.
Then there are the writers who write about our everyday lives, the daily dose of bitter pills and desperate hope that plagues us and in time shapes into the stuff the important writers write about, which then feeds back into our daily lives, etc., etc.
And finally there are the writers at the bottom of the food chain who see this cycle of ignorance and pretense but cannot find adequate words to describe it. They take day jobs and have a go at it anyway, and they are ridiculed by the important writers and even some everyday writers. And, because the important writers have an urge to invent words for what they don’t understand, they sometimes label these bottom feeders surrealists, which is, of course, wrong. Subrealists is closer.
The Subrealists bang away at things, and occasionally one of them breaks thru to the silent place at the center of the universe. These are our true poets, and we refuse to recognize them.
