Personal Thank You Note

Here's a thank you to you.

By virtue of web presence and personal interest some of you will follow me closer than others.

Suffice it to say that my political furore in national and more general context has collapsed to an everyday median. To me, Tony Abbott has shown shortcomings to an entire polis and socius - the normalising force he symbolises appears goofy and heartless. Internal rifts and now the ideological heartland of the Catholic church rumbles too. The governmental culture war, for me, is over.

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For me, poetry encapsulates either an approach or an immersion in entirety. That entirety can be unified, discontinuous, either simply or complexly - however one views it or has been educated to it.

I will not exclude any poet as definition bar that they ply with tools of exclusion. This is though not a laissez faire love in, nothing wrong with that nonetheless.

My preference for diversity in tone, pace, word choice and other generic traits of poetry as craft and as hopeful scribbling embraces to pluralism. The arch wave of the middle, though with its place firmly cemented, is immobile to social media, currently. I consider, for example, the work of JD Nelson and its popularity as indicator of, say, an alt poetry's social media soft virality.

Maybe, as has been said to me, that I was raised in an exile culture, from the Chilean diaspora, that I am sensitive to exclusion. Hypersensitive even. I agree, and today I take that as an affirmative non-exclusive difference.

To challenge Krishnamurti's notion of any claim to difference being a violence of individualising ego I will say that my past thrust and bell clanging was from a context of being excluded, as trauma, and that any difference was organic, even clinical, but never postured. I'm just not that interested in being that genteel but I'm not opposed to learning those types of mannerisms for the sake of growing worlds. The centre of poetry may disavow the sense of gated clique bestowed upon it, but from the outside it looks like it, feels like it, smells like it, sounds like it, acts like it.

And that's the subaltern's criticism. Misoriented necessarily by its externalism. Externalised by orientation. I take myself as example (I'm not the only one though). It was ultimately the energy of the subaltern that shaped the body of my work, and not necessarily the critique itself that broke down the walls of fraternalism, of small pond elitism. Though even now Sydney University in all its recent reported industrial conflict had marketed itself as "elite, not elitist."

Another personal example. I knew a Latin American literature academic from Peru - a Dr Casarubios-Moreno. After being co-opted from his position at UNSW Latin American literature department he personally identified "the Anglo-Saxon mafia". Of course, we hurt the ones we love.

He left Australia and gifted us a book he wrote here "La Tristeza Segun San Antonio". That's gracious.

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And to take up some snippets of contemporary thought - object oriented ontologist Levi Bryant, capturing Jacques Derrida's ethical strength, his ethical realism, asserts that difference makes being.

We are told to look for commonality. I do. The way I seek it will be my own. And by sheer dint of biology (or biologism, how ever have you) from thumbprints to gut cells to life events we will be so different to each other in this world and object universe that we will be even different to ourselves. One muscle cell will differ from another, one thumbprint different to its lateral other, one moment's perception of even one's self will change in a day.

I am quietly beaming at my year ahead here especially anticipating my Southerly Journal, Arena Magazine and ETZ submissions published. Alongside learning a new field of endeavour in health, science, maths and medicine - and continuing with fumbled speculations and personal breakthroughs, I'm happy that in a social media sense I am surrounded by the dedicated and the luminary. Some I may never agree with, some I'll drift to and fro from, and some I'm yet to even rap and engage with.

My personal writing as you see here and my works to be submitted to Ivor Indyk at some stage keep me going, along with my personal relationships, my everyday unfolding and buddings, and my scoundrel homelessness in language under some dizzying arch. My contribution back to a wider breadth with The Blue Space! Poetry Jam event and the Australian Latino Press due for midyear launch caps off that continuing, living fulfilment - that stable energized happiness and unrelenting metastable thresholds of physics and imagination.