Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

I find it intriguing, to say the least, to see where Kit Robinson, Tom Mandel &
James Sherry, three of the poets of my own G1-hood who I take to be among
its most serious political thinkers (Sherry’s Our Nuclear Heritage is the most
completely & directly political work any of us have accomplished, it seems, a
project at once both of ambition and courage) have chosen to work. Certainly
not the academy. None disdains the human drama of the marketplace. Sherry
currently is employed by Phillip Morris, which ranks somewhat ahead of the
Khmer Rouge in total number of fatalities caused over the past 40 years.
I’ve worked on ads that have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NY Times,
Forbes, Fortune and other bastions of liberal thought. And I work for a
company whose clients include both houses of congress, and the departments of
defense and justice. Not to mention most of the corporations one might hold an
attitude about. Including Phillip Morris.
I think that what I (or James or Tom or Kit or anyone) gains far more from
exposure to that world than from abstinence. This is where I think the
alternative approach has many of the same problems I associate with
anarchism, which is another mode of the Out position. (Anarchy is not a
political system but rather a transitional state…and always one on the way to
feudalism it would seem.)
I think that we are entering a very dark time politically. And a very dangerous
one. Experimentation would at best be a distraction. But who wants to be
distracted in a burning building?