INTRODUCTION

As in times past, the requirements for getting one's poetry published have less to do with writing great poems than with arranging personal contacts of mutual self-interest for career-minded wheeling and dealing to accomodate the power of corporate, federal or state agencies with which to influence literary policies and behavior. Such arrangements get the attention of university administrators, magazine and newspaper editors and book publishers, and even a rare TV executive, all of whom know success depends on their ability to control what is written and publically spoken - and the writers themselves know they must fashion their work to fit into this web of financial and personal relationships if they want to get printed in journals favored by more than a very few readers, and heard by more than the tiniest audience. Thus, editors will reject as tendentious and pretentious anyone whose work fails to shun controversy, neutralize dissent, mask ugliness, minimize danger and so prevent embarrassment to their comfortable rule of mediocrity, which makes the World safe for the business of entertainment.

Therefore, these poems and essays are intended to accomplish four things:

1. Express the dilemma of physical being as balanced so dangerously between creation and destruction.

2. Rebel against the literary establishment, which has locked poetry inside a prison of conformity and mediocrity.

3. Alert you to the imminent threat of ecocide and self-extinction caused by relentless economic growth and population explosion.

4. Offer some ideas that may help save our planet and human civilization.


Click LINKS at top of index column on left to find Survival essay and other sources.