POETRY AS COMMUNION: THE RETURN OF PBURGH; JESUS POETRY @ MWFA

FREE SNAKE MONSTER JESUS POEMS ABOUT SNAKES MONSTERS JESUS LET'S DO THIS
August 28th, 2016 @ Most Wanted Fine Art, 5015 Penn Avenue.
Celebratory Unrelated Music Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8llsiEIvvM0

Call me an unbeliever... call me someone with MESSED UP FEELINGS... CALL ME SOMEONE WITH FRIENDS... not that good friends... essentially, after tonight, I was left with two questions:
1. What is Love?
2. What is Fuck?

I think there's something essential about loneliness. The way it drives us... "The core of solitude is love"... that was another thought I had tonight, in the MWFA bathroom. A kind of of "romance" had taken over the evening, even a kind of "gothicism"... I wonder if rich people feel this way.

I wonder if there's legitimately challenging, good music in Pittsburgh, for the rich... like the jazz artists at the Jefferson Awards, who were good... Somehow I (less rich) am stuck with this tentative semiart scene, like the art is halfway family-friendly, only occasionally strange.

There are many artists in Pittsburgh, and their art has an almost economic effect: you have your artist friends and they practice polyamorous weird sex lives and art forms, they create an "intense weirdness", and they spread this to others. This can be poetry, but I think if we're being honest, as we should be, we have to admit that it's not simply poetry that we're looking for; it's a certain attitude, a certain environment, not locatable within any particular genre but answerable to the requirements of many; a series of artistic traditions, linked to a city and time.

If you are like me, you want all your best friends to perform in ways that F'N WORK in an environment that goes late, and for this I have to thank Margaret Bashaar; I have to thank her and Rachael Deacon and all the rest of the people who get this done. I think, as much as it is a shaping of the environment, this art is personal, a living of a life, taking a residence within a city, among people who you have these tenebrous relationships with; kinda artsy, kinda limited; there and not there. What is Love? (What is Fuck?)

The world (in Pittsburgh) is limited, and the world inside me, too, is limited, and it's all less than ideal, but at least it's practiced as poetry, which is an art form, and I've found the promise of being an artist is to have this tenebrous connection to a force deeper than yourself, a semireligous connection (art used to be subservient to religion, right?) So even the anti-Jesus poems that cropped up, like the real legitimate atheist scarred-by-Christianity poems, these poems contributed to, rather than took away from, a faith which was the blatant point of "Free Jesus Poems About Jesus, Let's Do This". Just like Snake or Monster poems before it, it was a kind of heightened semi-sarcastic semi-childish and (especially with Jesus poems) sacrilegious (but so equally, religous!) communion.

I wrote about communion before when Steve Roggenbuck came to town. When Rachael Deacon did "Come Thou Font of Every Blessing" it was sort of completely sincere and I sat on the floor, and everything was in kind of in that spirit. Religious ecstasy, a more-or-less joining of souls.

(Free Jesus Poems was organized by Rachael Deacon and Margaret Bashaar and is part of the annual series Free ____ Poems about _____. Let's Do this.)

~poetryburgh