Why I write poetry, or why poetry writes itself?

This below was posted at an online group I found in early 2023.

Poetic Outlaws

Why I Write Poetry

By: Julia Vinograd

Because I can't trust God

to look after the world and my friends.

Worship sure, wandering forests of legend

braiding flowers from the Tree of Life in my hair

while God's beard storms overhead.

But not trust. People die. Everyone dies.

It may be God's will but it's my won't.

Sea turtles live a thousand years.

My words can't become flesh.

My words can't heal an open wound.

But I am a poet and I know we need more time

to make our own huge splendid mistakes,

mistakes we deserve, not just the small clinical mistakes

built into out bodies.

We could have many-colored rings spinning around our minds

like the rings of Saturn.

We could map constellations around a lover's face

and every child could be the Messiah

because the world always needs saving.

God, it is a very beautiful world,

but no thank you, it is not enough.

No thank you for the sunrise when our eyes go blind.

A blank page is a place to list the creation

we weren't given. A shopping list of eternity

where we're never too sick to swallow fresh blueberries

and where the dance never ends.

A blank page is a paper bird to fold up and fly.

I can't change anything but I am a poet

and if I can't trust God I must speak

for the world and my friends.

Want more. Want so much more.

Test each day and night for ripeness

like a melon at the market.

You're crucified on the hands of a clock,

pull out those nails.

I'm throwing you a rope of words.

Hold on.

Julia Vinograd was a revolutionary street poet who threw bubbles instead of bricks. Her poetry was profound and she had a keen eye on what was happening in the world. She felt the suffering of the human race deeply and beautifully captured it in her poetry.

A feature documentary is being made right now about this important street poet titled: ‘Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit and Stone'. Check out her incredible story and sign up for the newsletter. Any support to help complete the first cut of the film would be greatly appreciated.

To read a few interviews with the great filmmaker, Ken Paul Rosenthal, check these out— Reaching The Head Through The Heart in Between Spirit and Stone and A Closer Look: On Making Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit and Stone

Appreciate you all keeping OUTLAW POETRY alive and thriving!

Sloan Bashinsky

Beautiful. 

I lived off and on the street maybe 6 years. Poetry started erupting out of me in the early l990s, before I was homeless. A 4-year dark night of the soul came, and a great deal of luminous and other poetry with it. I knew God existed, whereas before, I had only believed. A black night came, and there was nothing brewing in me but plotting every day how to kill myself, for 16 months. I was resurrected from that dead zone by something clearly not of this world. The first stint at being homeless came and lasted a few years, as more poetry came, some of which I could not assign to my own creation. I was not homeless and more poetry came. I was homeless again, and very little poetry came. Very little poetry came since then. Since late 2017, I'm not homeless. I'm 80. When I wrote poetry, it was because it just came out of me. I did not sit down to try to make a poem. The poem sat me down to show me something about me, about life, and about much more. I came to view all of life as poetry.  

 

Sheila
OMG! Your reply, which in fact is itself a poem, literally made me gasp ..an adjective for which I'm struggling to find... it was positively powerful.

Sloan Bashinsky
There's nothing like seemingly endless grindings into dust and oblivion to season a soul and however it expresses on this small backwater planet in an unfathomable universe, which I seriously doubt just up and came into being without a little nudge from ... something ... 

 

This poem leaped out of me shortly before I was diagnosed with life-threatening MRSA flesh-eating bacteria, when I was homeless in Key West, 2003.

I AM A MAN  

 

I am a man. 

 

I said,

I am a man! 

 

What means it,

being a man? 

 

A man is a warrior:

he lives by a code of honor,

his word is reliable,

his actions confirm his words,

his commitment is holiness,

his enemies are welcome at his hearth,

he fears but moves forward,

he cries and gets up again,

he hates but forgives,

he loves and let’s go,

he doubts but trusts God,

he’s a good friend,

he seeks resolutions,

he demands nothing,

he risks everything,

he regrets his mistakes,

he seeks to make amends,

he puts others’ welfare first,

he accepts apologies truly made,

he expects nothing back,

he lives ready to die,

he laughs when he “should” scream,

he screams when he “should” laugh,

he sings just because,

he shrugs off insults,

he learns from misfortune,

he cusses God for making him,

he wishes he was done,

he loves children and animals,

he relishes a woman’s scent,

he smiles when he’s content,

he knows God’s his master,

he walks in rainbows,

his garden is the world,

his way is nature,

he loves fishing,

his wife is his soul,

his food is life,

his pay is whatever he receives.

Yep, he’s crazy.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

spirituality, sex, kundalini, gurus, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and beyond

For quite a while now, I've wondered how Christendom still reads the stories about Jesus and Magadalene in the Gospels, yet does does not see they were a couple in every way. I mean, if she publicly kissed his bare dirty feet and washed them with. her own tears and hair, and then anointed them with precious ointment she scarce could afford what did she wash and anoint him with when they were in private? 

And, of the three women who saw Jesus at the tomb after his near-death experience, who'd he tell to go to the men disciples in hiding and tell them she had seen him and he had sent her to tell them he would be with shortly? It was not his mother or the other woman there. It was Magdalene he sent. Jesus never did anything by happenstance. He wanted the cowardly male disciples to know who was the most important to him. His wife. 

I knew that before I read HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, which should be required reading for every teenage and adult Christian.

Meanwhile, in an online spirituality group where I don't think I've seen anyone close to being a Christian, this question was posted. (I'm Puzzleheaded)

Ambz

Does anyone else start to feel aroused and sexual when embracing spirituality or is it just me and I am odd??

Doesn't happen every time or with everyone but I definitely have noticed when talking aboit spirituality and getting deep into it I can have weird thoughts for the other person if I am feeling very connected such as a fleeting thought of hugging or kissing them and yes the odd time ( down below can get frisky)....
😂
I am 28f for the record and I do not know if this is normal but it's happened for as long as I can remember and especially if I am feeling love or warmth from feeling connected with someone...

I feel weird about it and I don't think this would be common!? 

 

Plum

A lot of people sexualize themselves and others when they experience spiritual energy. It is normal and should be taught openly as an experience on the path. A lot of spiritual teachers are trained on how to deal with students who approach or manipulate them sexually. And obviously a lot of leaders and teachers also know this and either fall for their own influence, or apply it on purpose. 

 

This is also why world leaders, and CEO's are at the top of the sexual hierarchy. It is normal though. And needs to talked about openly to clear everyone's conscience and purify the mind and body of distractions. If you are sexually aroused, ask yourself what it is that you want to create, or become. These 'feelings' enter the body and move the lower energies for material creation, which includes sexual union. Mastrubation helps, and I am a big fan. But honestly there is something deeper going on. And pursuing that is part of the inspired way of life.

Puzzleheaded

Well, said, Plum, except I'm not sure the lower chakras are any less nor more important than the upper chakras, which all together, in or out of harmony, make up a much greater whole.

Puzzleheaded

I'm 80, and probably am past the sexual arousal stage, but I went through it in many heterosexual ways and variations. I made my share of bad decisions with being intimate with women, and I made some good decisions, as well.

My question to you, Ambz, is, you didn't feel sexual arousal before you embraced "spirituality"?.

My suggestion to you is, whenever you feel sexual energy with someone else, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "spirituality". It very well could be "projection", seeking missing parts of oneself, what mental health workers call "transference." So, take it slow, see if it keeps showing up between you and another person. And if you and/or the other person already are involved in another intimate relationship, then perhaps best you don't have sex, unless you want to complicate your life in ways you perhaps cannot possibly yet imagine :-).

Some people say sexual urges are caused by the kundalini rising, which certainly can happen. The India yogi Muktananda wrote about that in his autobiography, and of his shock that he had lost control of his penis after his guru had given him shakitapat.

I knew a woman, who, with her husband, were Muktananda's students dating back to his ashram in India. She said she left Muktananda, because he was having sex with his female students. Her husband did not leave Muktananda, and that's why she left her husband, or vice versa. I knew other students of Muktananda in Boulder, who seemed to be having a really hard time living without him, after he had given then "shaktipat", which is said to cause the kundalini to start rising.

Renown American educator Joseph Chilton Pearce became a student of Muktananda, and wrote what seemed to me very good stuff about the kundalini being innate in every person, and, in tribal times, the Kundalini rose naturally in rites of passage stages, as a child grew up, culminating around age 22. But in "civilized" society, the kundalini was blocked in children by "modern" childrearing, education and religious practices. Pearce said giving shakitapat was a way to try to set that right, but to help children avoid all of that, they needed to be raised very differently. Pearce did not write in what I read by him, anything about Muktananda having sex with his students.

The best thing I saw written by a well known yogi, is Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, about him and his yogi master. Both men seemed to me to be on a very good path.

I've heard first-hand accounts and have read many more accounts of "gurus" having sex in their "ashrams" with their students, in the name of "spiritual growth".

For example, the somewhat famous guru G.I. Gurdjieff was reported to have impregnated quite a few of his women students. 

 

An excellent book on leaving a guru is David Kherdian's ON A SPACESHIP WITH BEELZEBUB: BY A GRANDSON OF GURDJIEFF. (BEELZEBUB'S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON, was one of Gurdjieff's books.) A professional writer, Kherdian tells of being in two different Gurdjieff groups, and the ordeals he endured when he left each group. He did not write about the leaders of those groups having sex with their students. Nor did he write a bout Gurdjieff doing that. I recommended that book to quite a few people, who were trying to leave a guru.

The rinpoche of the very large Tibetan Buddhist community in Boulder, Colorado, was reported to have had sex ongoing with his male and female followers. He also was reported to have died of from liver failure caused by alcoholism. It was reported that his hand-picked American student successor continued the sex with students of both sexes practice, and he contracted HIV and did not tell anyone, and a number of his students became infected, and that's what caused the public light to shine on all of the above, and that Tibetan community split in half over it. One half said it was nobody else's business, it was part of their spiritual path and karma. The other half rejected that. One half left Boulder. Finally, the Tibetan hierarchy stepped in and appointed a young Tibetan lama to take over, and he seemed okay to me. I lived in Boulder during all of that.It's very difficult to leave a guru, whether or not sex is involved.

I never had a human guru. What grabbed and went to work on me was not of this world. it turned me upside down and inside out and every which a way but loose, and stood me before many mirrors looking at me. It arranged all manner of things for me to experience, which I would not have chosen. It's still at it.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

America's choices: the Nazis or the Fukawis

During the time of covid-shutdown America, I stumbled across a voice howling (on Substack) from the Florida wilderness, which I felt was a good bit more tuned in than most of what I saw online. A recent sampling:

My Two Senses

What I'd Rather Be Doing
Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker

Mar 13, 2023

I spent most of my career in creating stuff and imagined that I would be spending most of my time doing stuff to amuse my nieces and nephews… Instead I am spending inordinate amounts of time alerting my fellow Americans to the coming wave of Christo-Fascist, Authoritarian, Oligarchy that continues to pretty much unabated to destroy our great experiment in a Democratic Republic.

BTW this thing pretty much began in the modern era with the Dulles Brothers (Nazi Lovers) and the once considered laughable John Birch Society whose dogma then is now that of the modern Republican Party. 

My next post will provide a “hi-light reel” of that arc in our history that we apparently just fail to see. 

Sloan Bashinsky

Sadly, you are correct. Alas, the Democrats have done and continue to do plenty to end the Republic, too. About all of which a buddy of mine and I also have tried our darnedest to try to wake up the dead, But then, I think in Gospels, Jesus told someone who wanted to attend a funeral, instead of following him (Jesus), "Let the dead bury the dead." But then, if we don't keep shooting off our mouths, blowing our wannabe trumpets, how will God view that? I think it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said, "Silence in the face of Evil itself is Evil. God will not hold us guiltless." Maybe ETs will say enough is enough! And invade to save the planet from Earthlings😎.

Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker

Sloan, we need clear leadership that is willing to call Republicans Fascists and to rally the 50% of Democrats in my state that do not vote. If they did this state would no longer be in the grip of Republicans.

Instead, they seem to believe that denial of what the Republican agenda is or that it is bluster is the only defense.

When we are reduced to waiting for miracles to intercede, then we are in real trouble.

Thanks for your comments as always

Sloan Bashinsky   

I have been less kind to the Republican side. I have likened them to Nazis. Look at any Trump rally. Seas of white faces. In the law is the doctrine, res ipsa loquitur, Latin for, the thing speaks for itself. Res ipsa is evidentiary, admissible as evidence, determinative proof. 

The American right ignore what Ivana revealed about Donald. When they were married, he kept a book of Hitler's speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed, and sometimes at night he pulled out that book and read it. It boggles my mind that any woman, or black, or brown, or yellow, or red American, votes for Trump.

The Democrats, of whom I am not either, remind me of the famous in some circles Fukawi tribe, who are always getting lost and gathering in a circle and sitting down and chanting, "Where in the fuck are we? Where in the fuck are we?" 

If half the Democrats in Florida do not vote, perhaps only God and ETs are all that's left to hope for? 

As if someone elsewhere was reading over my shoulder: 

Yahoo Finance
White House demands Pence apologize for 'homophobic joke' aimed at Buttigieg 

LIBBY CATHEY
Mon, March 13, 2023

The White House on Monday asked former Vice President Mike Pence to apologize for what it called a "homophobic joke" he made over the weekend geared at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

"The former vice president's homophobic joke about Secretary Buttigieg was offensive and inappropriate, all the more so because he treated women suffering from postpartum depression as a punchline," White House press secretary Karine-Jean Pierre said in a statement. "He should apologize to women and LGBTQ people, who are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect."

Pence, headlining at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington for journalists and politicians, mocked Buttigieg for taking parental leave after the birth of his adopted twins while he said Americans faced issues with air travel.

"He took two months 'maternity' leave whereupon thousands of travelers were stranded in airports, the air traffic system shut down, and airplanes nearly collided on our runways. Pete is the only person in human history to have a child and everyone else gets postpartum depression," Pence said, according to reporters present.

Notably, Buttigieg's twins were born prematurely, developed Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection (RSV) and one was hospitalized and put on a ventilator, a point his husband, Chasten, called out in a tweet directed at the rumored 2024 presidential hopeful.

"An honest question for you, @Mike_Pence, after your attempted joke this weekend. If your grandchild was born prematurely and placed on a ventilator at two months old - their tiny fingers wrapped around yours as the monitors beep in the background - where would you be?" he said.

Donna

Pence is as bad as Trump.  If he thinks he is funny he isn't.  He is another republican disgrace.  Don't Run Pence.  You won't get votes because the Trump lovers are going to hold it against you that you wouldn't throw the election.  Only smart thing you have done in years.

Sloan Bashinsky

Pence impressed me on Jan 6, by standing firm, and later, by saying Trump put him and his family at risk. Pence then waffled, didn't seem interested in Trump being prosecuted for trying to overthrow the national government. If Pence is so "pro-life", why isn't he frothing at the mouth ongoing for Trump being prosecuted? 

What this Independent cannot accept is the 2 months leave Pete took from a cabinet position. I think he should resign. I think he has cost the Democrats votes in 2024. 

My personal history is, I fathered three children by the same woman. She was wasted after each birth. I got up in the middle of the night to bring her our new baby to nurse. I changed the baby's diapers and washed them out in the toilet, and went back to bed and to sleep. 

After our first child died at 7 weeks of sudden infant death syndrome, we were devastated. I could barely move. I was in law school. I took one day off from classes and then returned to class. It was horrible. Yet, I had to keep moving. 

So, I can sympathize with Pete and his spouse in that way. And in another way. I have a granddaughter who felt like she was male and had surgery to become male. I view religious freaks like Pence as terrorists. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

failure is essential to living and being

I spent most of my life failing at what I took on. I kept trying, though. 

Early this year, I joined an online group, which seemed to have considerably more substance than what I was seeing at Facebook and Reddit.

Poetic Outlaws

Exegesis of Failure

By: Emil Cioran

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself.

Our kind is not a fatality but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats, we wallow—craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence—in the unanimous mud. And when we dream of seas changed into holy water, it is too late to dive into them, and our advanced state of corruption keeps us from drowning there: the world has infested our solitude; upon us the traces of others become indelible.

In the gamut of creatures, only man inspires a sustained disgust. The repugnance which an animal begets is provisional; it never ripens in thought, whereas our kind obsesses our reflections, infiltrates the mechanism of our detachment from the world in order to confirm us in our system of refusal and non-adherence.

After each conversation, whose refinement alone is enough to indicate the level of a civilization, why is it impossible not to regret the Sahara and not to envy the plants or the endless monologues of zoology? If with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign.

We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us . . . Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.

And if we meet others, it is to degrade ourselves together in a race to the void, whether in the exchange of ideas, schemes, or confessions. Curiosity has provoked not only the first fall but the countless ones of every day of our lives. Life is only that impatience to fall, to fail, to prostitute the soul’s virginal solitudes by dialogue, ageless and everyday negation of Paradise.

Man should listen only to himself in the endless ecstasy of the intransmissible Word, should create words for his own silences and assents audible only to his regrets. But he is the chatterbox of the universe; he speaks in the name of others; his self loves the plural. And anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Politicians, reformers, and all who rely on a collective pretext are cheats. There is only the artist whose lie is not a total one, for he invents only himself. Outside of the surrender to the incommunicable, the suspension amid our mute and unconsoled anxieties, life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

The implicit plural of “one” and the avowed plural of “we” constitute the comfortable refuge of false existence. Only the poet takes responsibility for “I,” he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.

Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration. Shelly’s “generous” aspect cripples most of his work; Shakespeare, by a stroke of luck, never “served” anything.

The victory of non-authenticity is fulfilled in philosophical activity, that complacence in “one,” and in prophetic activity [whether religious, moral, or political], that apotheosis of “we.”

Definition is the lie of the abstract mind; inspired formula the lie of the militant one; a definition is always the cornerstone of a temple; a formula inescapably musters the faithful. Thus all teachings begin. How then fail to turn to poetry? It has, like life, the excuse of proving nothing.)

Thinking Cioran was quite the chatterbox himself, I volunteered some of my own chatter.

Sloan Bashinsky

How about?

spiritual bipolar disorder,

the cause of all

human ails,

including wars,

if the demons aren't counted

spiritual bi polar disorder,

the destruction of the

south pole,

the feminine,

the north pole,

he ain't been

right in the head

since she's been gone

Sloan Bashinsky

I can't find anything about Cioran being poet. I did find more stuff about him assessing poets.

Poetic Outlaws Author

He wasn't a poet. He was a philosopher who wrote poetically. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

I gather he wasn’t a mystic, either. Yet, he seemed in what you posted here to hold forth on both topics, as if he was an expert or blessed with all-knowing, yet how could that be, if he was not a poet nor a mystic, asks a poet and a mystic?

Poetic Outlaws Author

I think his wisdom came from beyond even the mystics and the poets. He was brilliant. 

Sloan Bashinsky

I’ve known lots of brilliant people, far smarter than me, who had no clue, were not able to grasp, nor appreciate, nor even believe I wasn’t making up what little I told them of what I had experienced that was not of this world, and they were just as tone death to small amounts of reams of poetry that had leaped out of me. Had similar experience with quite a few poets, yet not with all the poets I crossed paths with.

Back in my own "time zone"...

In early 1987, out of bright ideas, at the end of my rope, feeling I had failed in every way a man could fail, I made a desperate prayer:

"Dear God, I do not want do die like this, failed. Please help me." I paused, then added, "I offer my life to human service." 

Something fluttered inside of me, tears came into my eyes. It passed. I went on about my day.

About ten days later, I awoke in the wee hours, saw two spirit beings shaped like white shifts hovering above me in the darkness. I heard, not with my ears, but quite clearly:

"This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you." 

I saw a white flash and my body and psyche was jolted by something electrical. That happened two more times. The two beings faded out. I was physically shaking and sweating. 

Slowly but inexorably, I was turned every upside down, inside out, and every which a way but loose. I was stood before many mirrors. My perspective of everything, including myself, changed, and kept changing, as the process continued.

In April 2001, when I again felt like total, abject failure, a poem fell out of me as fast as I could type it.

The World's Greatest Failure

I know what it is to love fully,

have my heart broken by death

and by loved ones' rejections,

Over and over again,

so I can love even more.

I know what it is to be engulfed in pain,

Awash in evil,

Terrified, enraged, despaired,

Believing God has again forsaken me,

Then be given the truth

that again makes me free.

I know what it is to doubt,

Be lost and wandering

time and time again,

Then be rescued yet again

and my faith grows deeper.

I know what it is to blindly trust,

Then be destroyed by betrayal

time and time again,

Until I trust only God.

I know what it is to have much

and be completely of this world,

Then have it all taken away

and be in the world but not of it.

I know what it is to fail in this world,

and fail and fail and fail:

The world's greatest failure,

I can serve only God.

I know what it is to give

and give and give and give;

I cannot stop giving

because giving is receiving.

I know what it is to explain God

time after time after time again.

Something demands I keep explaining:

Maybe someone will listen,

Maybe me.

The irony of having prayed in early 1987, for God to deliver me from my own failure, did not escape me. 

Yet, what is failure, really? 

Who, or what, decides?

I read online the other day, that nobody achieves anything, who does not fail many times. Failing is essential to living and being.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com