i am a communist who is a poet, not a communist poet. my poems aren't doing communism. much ink has been spilled on the futility of that idea and i tend to agree with the reasoning but not with the underlying conclusion, that poetry itself is useless

no poem is going to topple anything worth toppling. that's not really what it's for. poetry is older and in a sense more important than capital, than the capitalist framework to which it is currently captive

we might as well talk about abolishing music as abolishing poetry, or talk about accomplishing communism or anarchy with song as with poetry. neither make much sense

i believe there are things worth not just fighting for but coming home to when the fighting is over, and that's what art is to me - literature, poetry, music, visual art, stripped of their relationship to money. they are ways to be touched by another living soul

i often respect attempts to engage in radical political action via art, and some of my favorite art is exactly that. but it's not, in my view, a prerequisite to art having value. i think that's committing the same error capitalism does, at its heart