Our Final P3/Right to Die/Breeding for Truth/3 Cartoons/

This will be the final edition of Ed Coletti's P3.  It feels to me as though ten years or close to that is about enough and that this blog has run its course.  We live in an age of instant communication.  Facebook actually may do a better job of getting out the word.  I realize that the P3 and its archives live much longer than do  social media postings.  However, the popularity of blogging may be declining exponentially.  BUT, I will not give up blogging entirely! No Money In Poetry will continue to live!  NMIP serves a somewhat different function for a more specialized readership.  People who enjoy literature and writing, painting, sculpture, drama, and cinema should remain interested in reading it.  I will be able to get out NMIP more frequently, perhaps monthly or bimonthly.  If you already are receiving emails announcing NMIP editions, you'll continue to receive them.  If you are not being notified and wish to be, simply drop me an email at edcoletti(at)sbcglobal(dot)net.  Of course substitute an ampersand (@) for the "at" and a period (.) for the "dot."

 

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(P1) Philosophical

This wonderful letter appeared in the Jan. 28th issue of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and pretty much says it all for me. (This issue of People appeared prior to Brittany Maynard's brave move to die in Oregon.

Right to die

 

EDITOR: If you are reading this, you are going to die. Evidence for eternal life relies on faith. My solution to this truth is living. I live today to its fullest because this is the only life I know. 

Our wise, enlightened forefathers bequeathed us inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I submit that this includes the right to die. So many believe that we don’t have this right. We have no national religion nor church, only the constitutional right to practice our beliefs — or unbelief.

For those who warn of the slippery slope of mass suicides or mandatory euthanasia, I disagree. We mammals have an innate sense of survival. We humans persevere under the most horrific conditions. I want to live. I daresay that you do, too. But when we reach a point of insurmountable pain despite the best palliative care, or unremitting inconsolable depression, or have reached a state in our life that we know we are finished, why can’t we choose our demise without having to break the law or put loved ones who want to help us at risk?

Dear reader, I wish you a peaceful death surrounded by your loved ones. Let me go in peace, too.

CHRIS SORK

Santa Rosa

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(P2) Poetical

Breeding For Truth

by Ed Coletti

When as in a science fiction movie

or in a Wallace Stevens poem

hell, that all-defining inferno,  could

be extinguished and children might be

more apt to recognize their parents

as the frauds we all become when we sire

posing as thoroughbreds while, no more

than the nags the word “parenthood” demands,

we preen, prance and perform our dressage

(though only great money can bring this off)

poorly, transparently, and our words,

our advice to them, rumbles from

within an empty hogshead of sour sherry,

useless, undrunk, without any utility at all

except the confidence that children also

become parents and fail in each

particular the same way an odds-on

favorite stumbles, falls, and is shot.

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(P2) Political

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Thomas Paine and Senator Self/Show Me The Money/GenesisSchmenesis/John's City Lights Book/

(P1) Political 

Here's a political poem I've written and enjoy! (ed coletti)

Senator Self

rises at 5 AM galvanized to work

drinks his cup of Jamaican mountain blue

remembers he is one of only two

wonders when the other will die or lose

glows a bit

            delighted that he’s  amused himself

wondering                what his votes are doing today

catches himself putting faces on them

stifles this dangerous impulse

grabs his phone to call the money

meeting it somewhere dark for lunch at noon.


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(P2) Philosophical

  
 The Modern Error of Genesis

  The eminent historian of religions and civilizations, Arnold Toynbee, wrote the following in the New York Times on September 16, 1973, in one of his last articles before his death: "For pre-(Christian) man, nature was not a treasure trove of 'natural resources.'  Nature was a goddess, 'mother Earth,' and the vegetation that sprang from the surface, the animals that roamed and the minerals hiding in the bowels all shared of nature's divinity and were sacred.  I have become aware of a startling and disturbing truth, that a new view, monotheism, enunciated in the book of Genesis, removed these restraints of awe that precluded greed.  Any greedy impulse to exploit nature was held in check by an awe of the sacredness of nature.  This inhibition was removed in Genesis." (Where we are told "to subdue" the Earth.  "Subdue" in Hebrew means to seduce, to conquer and vanquish.)

--William Edelen Toward The Mystery-1983

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(P3) Poetical

John Coletti's Book Launch Party at City Lights Bookstore 
                           Tues. Nov.  25 at 7PM

Join City Lights Books as we celebrate another installment in the City Lights Spotlight Series. The latest edition is Deep Code by John Coletti. John will read from his new collection with special guest and Spotlight Series alumnus Micah Ballard.
Deep Code explores "side language," as a subset of other languages, whether slang or metaphor, to both communicate and obfuscate.
Combining a bent lyric perception with a fragmentation redolent of French cubism, Coletti portrays contemporary urban experience, from power relations and personal loss to nights among city dwellers recording their convivial distress, glad and dissolute at once. Part teddy bear fleeing the cultish outlines of the American northwest, part Apollinaire in Brooklyn, Coletti culls his materials from the ether and assembles them into resonant structures at once intensely personal and strangely universal—a little outrageous—both confusingly lovely and apt in their ungainliness. Lines like "I'm nearly home is what everyone says" and "triceratops & the bad glue / that made us good friends," only begin to demonstrate the astute linguistic eye and deft line break sense of John Coletti.
Praise for Deep Code:
"A sonic surrealist typewriter clacks in rhythm across Colletti's brow. Read it in his sweet-eye glance: poetry grams of tender touch. Tuff cookie meat! & mystery. Shit is electric wire awesome stuff."––Thurston Moore
"Deep Code is a theory of expressive subterfuge performed as piecemeal continuities. Its poems are distressed & fine like all the chances we forget we're free to make for one another, edged to mellow like the contours of a party felt in general & intimate perception."––Dana Ward
About the Author:
John Coletti is the author of the book Mum Halo (2010) and the chapbooks Same Enemy Rainbow (2008) and Physical Kind (2005). With Anselm Berrigan, he is the author of the limited edition Skasers (2012). He has served as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and co-edits Open 24 Hours Press. Other projects include a collaborative print with artist Kiki Smith, a chapbook collaboration with Shana Moulton, and a libretto for Excelsior, an opera composed by Caleb Burhans commissioned by Chicago's Fifth House Ensemble which premiered in 2013.

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Books related to this event:

Deep Code City Lights Spotlight No. 12 John Coletti due out in November 2014 City Lights Spotlight Series No. 12: Deep Code explores "side language," as a subset of other languages, whether slang or metaphor, to both communicate and obfuscate.

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