Accessing Worlds of Poetry

Can’t make nothing out of nothing but no one has nothing.
We all have something. The argument of possibility is not constrained by economics or talent. The only limit is effort and desire.
In flat democracy, access is everything. Birth doesn’t matter. All skill is a matter of hours. Nothing is kept for for a sacred select few. All doors are only closed temporarily as an illusion.
If you can speak English, you can teach it.
If you can vote, you can make a life of politics.
If you can make a sound, you can make music.
If you can move, you can learn to dance.
If you can make words or symbols you can make poetry.
I think I’m having an inner backlash against shining hope. Some kneejerk response. It’ll go away in a minute. Ok, give me two.
Why does this remind me of faith healing?
Oh hun’ you just ain’t praying with enough belief. Try again. Do it just right and god, whose quite accommodating, just a little picky is all, will hear and in a blaze of lightning fix everything.
Is the alternative validation boards that make arbitrary hoops to cut down on the number of people “committed enough” to simplify the process?
Ignorance and will being king alarms me. “Everything goes” is limp and vacous as a rubber chicken.
Standards are not an evil thing.
Being Not As Good in absolute or relative terms is not a moral thing. It isn’t a taboo. Knowing where you are at at the start of path, whether proud or humble of that, is profitable to know.
Claiming to be tapped into some divine strand of Inspiration that flattens out distinctions and makes all equal is quaint.
I think I’ve heard from enough of the contingent of writers who look eye flutteringly and say they don’t have time to read, who are easily impressed and don’t engage with contemporaries or any historical work. Words are for communication, aren’t they?
My dad once remarked that some of the best conversations he has are when no one else is around but communication in a vacuum is odd, or so I’m told. It doesn’t get funny looks in this neighbourhood with all the homeless people and the new hearing aid sized phones but as normal practice, how can one write something which isn’t tiresome or trite or self-absorbed when alone? One isn’t necessarily responding with poetry to poetry. Ekphrastics to painting, photos, news stories, or doing responses to conversations or songs or some other mode is possible. But various poetries are a dialect. Writing in isolation one can diverge off into an idiolect that one you can understand. Or else you write conversation dialect and name it poetry.
Good communication requires opinions based on observation and thought, bringing experience to bear to bridge experiences and audience. If there is no rigour, there can be luck or indulgent audience who takes communication as phatic placeholder of relationship until there are ideas for transference. There is cooperative engagement in process.
As much as humanity has learned has to be parsed out skull by skull and within generations can be lost.
Creation begins for each person at birth. The universe only exists for that person for what has reached that person. It can take decades to absorb before one can stand on the shoulders of anything that has gone before. All else is exercise to ready for that. One may take that seriously or not. One can only understand or be understood by someone with comparable knowledge to grasp the same things. In this way we are somewhat lockstepped in our level or ignorance.
Actually knowing something, having studied in depth is fairly rare and hard to find out in Canadian culture where one doesn’t like to mention one’s credibility lest it be seen as uppity.
Modesty is a virtue, except excess of virtue becomes a vice. Being modest is fine except when it blocks communication. Modesty when it is shame of knowledge and not educating understanding that could happen could be construed as just being unnecessarily withholding and being difficult.
Maybe that’s pat of the reason why I find Christian Bok so refreshing. As he said in Open Letter at Wells,

CB: I would like to think though, that unlike many poets my age or younger, I’m operating from a position of relative, historic strength. I have a doctorate in poetry. I’ve dedicated 25 years of my life to its study, and now I have a black belt in the subject. I have already demonstrated a thorough immersion in the history of writing, including the history of traditions outside my areas of interest.

There is an enormous amount of knowledge and worlds of perceptions, in part due to the balooning world population.
Ron Sillimen reiterated this paradox he mentioned a few years ago about how big of pond poetry has become

I don’t think anybody yet has figured out how to handle the evolving revolution in poetry’s relationship to its audience. We have way more than ten thousand publishing poets in the English language, which is maybe ten times what it was when I was in my early 20s & close to 100 times what it was when the New Americans were making their way in the 1950s.
In another decade, we will easily have more than 20,000 publishing poets. Does anybody think that the actual reading audience for poetry has grown proportionately? (The only way to answer yes to that is if you think nobody reads poetry – or at least reads it seriously – but poets.) This is a far more profound change than, say, the collapse of trade publishing, the death of bookstores that won’t carry your chapbook, or the fact that we are producing close to a thousand new poets every year when the number of jobs for poets expands by about 50.

What is meaningful or useful to know? Who we access is who resonates. We attach by patterns of knowledge and language rather than patterns of geography or class or gender. We learn by networks of who we have come across and organically through who those people know.
We are constrained by access, but perhaps more by energies of lifetime.
Who has the puzzle pieces of knowledge of what I need to know but don’t know I need to know until I happen upon it?
Or like Ernest Bramah said “One learns to itch where one can scratch.”
One can make do with hand-me-downs of what others say is the best poetry.
It may be a serviceable fit. The color, cut, weave, size may rarely all suit perfectly.
When one tailors one’s own, one is still limited by materials at hand, by one’s own hand’s skill. Does perfect occur?
Constantly. Fleetingly. As self changes and what does work wears thin and needs replacement with the other (im)perfect variant options that serve.