So let's think for a minute about poetry in its aspect as a kind of effort contributed, along with other kinds of work, toward making civilization.

I imagine sort of a double-edged phenomenon : on the one hand, an aesthetic experience; on the other, a kind of contribution toward understanding.

The poet is a sort of companion presence, offering persuasive summations or interpretations of what everyone is experiencing.

& in order to do that, the poet has to negotiate between poetry and everything else, between poetry and not-poetry.

So there is an internal world of pure poetry, pure artistic experience, and then there is poetry as it acts (verbally, interpretively) on reality.

It's not easy to find that productive boundary-state, between poetry & not-poetry, between the world of poets & poetry-lovers, and the ordinary world, the larger world.

It seems to involve a special dramatic gift : of engagement, of empathy, of expression.

Sometimes it seems there are so many forces, both within & outside the "poetry world", which militate against finding that boundary-state.

The insatiable hunger for words & verbalizing & books - this mania itself can isolate us from the ordinary world of not-poetry. The glut & the over-saturation & the jadedness & finally the tastelessness of it all.

The obsession with poetry as a career, or as a playing field for literary politics, or as an arena for over-subtle internal critiques : these tend to obscure its aspect as a vocation in the midst of all the other civilization-making activities.

It seems to me, today anyway, that precisely how a poet, or a generation of poets, negotiates this paradoxical boundary area, is a key factor in determining the choices which undergird a literary style.

Very interesting post over here today.

Robert's approach seems to parallel what Langdon Hammer does (in Hart Crane & Allen Tate) with respect to an earlier generation. I mean he looks at the relation between a poet's ambition to address (or create) a certain social class of reader, a social group with certain habits & assumptions - and the effects of this ambition on style, subjects, philosophical attitudes.

Jeffrey Bahr writes:

"I've posted a challenge to any who would engage seriously in the attempt to -- if not reconcile, then at least identify the goals -- among the disparate views of what poetry is, should be, must do."

Tall order. Definition is power. Criticism creates the vocabulary and context for understanding & reception. With such a large abstraction ("poetry") fitted out to explain such a diverse phenomenon, the resulting contention is inevitable.

Langdon Hammer's book mentioned here yesterday presents a sort of close-sociological comparative analysis of the interrelated careers of Crane, Tate & Eliot. Hammer starts out by demystifying some of the reactionary-traditionalist rhetoric offered by some of the big Moderns, Eliot & Pound in particular. Rather than looking at them as defenders of tradition, or backward-looking medievalist-traditionalists, Hammer tries to show how they were pioneers of literature's New Class : entrepreneurs in the business of culture. He talks about how their differing attitudes toward established sources of cultural reception (Eliot's embrace of English establishment, Pound's opposite tack) influenced the amazingly contrastive outcomes of their careers (Eliot the lauded Nobel prizewinner; Pound the jailed treasonous crackpot).

He then looks at the differing responses of Hart Crane & Allen Tate to the cultural atmosphere which Eliot did so much to invent. I'm just getting into this section of the book. He contrasts Eliot's (& Stevens') ability to separate making a living from their identities & prestige as poets, with Crane's theatrically conflicted background. (I will never get over this iconic conjunction : Hart Crane, the son of successful Cleveland candy manufacturer - inventor of the Life Saver - dies a suicide-by-drowning in the Caribbean. Poets' lives often have such strange symbolic-fateful resonance. This is a real cultural-psychic phenomenon, if not an act of Providence.) Crane's path was marked, early on, for the taboo-scapegoat-genius-outsider role.

Hammer argues that Allen Tate's own conflicted response (on many levels) to Crane's example only spurred him to emulate Eliot's career path, and take it further - firmly installing (along with John Crowe Ransom & others) the presence of poet-critics in the English Departments of American academia.

The poet-critic was a new kind of professional person, who combined valuable technical knowledge of two kinds : poetry-making and scholarship. With this dual capability, such a professional could be included in the intellectual power-structure of the "New Class"; with anthologies and textbooks like Understanding Poetry, the ground was laid for the next generation's innovation : the Creative Writing Program.

So I'm just getting into Hammer's book. It's really a "close reading" of the literary biographies of these men, and the consequences for poetry and for "poetry careers" generally. I think it's a wonderful book; provides a kind of lens for viewing today's different atmosphere. Hammer in the early pages focuses on the paradoxical prestige and authority which accrued to Eliot's forms of detachment & disinterest. Because he was neither an academician nor a professional writer or journalist, his criticism augmented the sense of poetry's (and the individual poet's) independent cachet, its cultural autonomy.

In thinking about this, alongside Jeffrey's challenge mentioned above, my first vague thoughts in this direction circle around the idea that whatever poetry offers a society at large must be grounded in some kind of imaginative and intellectual empathy. Poetry has to present a fiction of its own independent momentum : that is, independent to some extent of the poet's individual background, capable of understanding and interpreting others. Yet, at the same time, poetry, if it is to fulfill its purpose, has to be a kind of end in itself : it has to be a source of pleasure for its own sake. And here the special verbal and intellectual capabilities of unique and individual poets are brought to bear. Take, for example, a fine poem in the current issue of Poetry, by Carolina Ebeid, "Reading Celan in a Subway Station". In this poem, with metaphorical sleight-of-hand, the poet fuses listening to an accordion player in the subway with the emotional atmosphere of Celan. It's a very curious magic.

So these dual imperatives - the ability to penetrate history & experience beyond the private & personal, and the ability to raise personal (poetic) expression to a highly-integrated state - seem to underly what poetry is about.

The question about the "professionalization" of creative writing - has been very controversial. When poetry becomes an institution, and part of a larger institution, and a kind of business... what is lost, what is gained? I guess there are no simple answers or single truths about this.

Spiritual truths, down through history, have shown themselves rather disruptive to social arrangements. And sometimes poets must experience life outside the circles of privilege and custom and family and economic self-interest, in order to speak with any authenticity or imaginative empathy about the conditions and lives they encounter. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (discussed in current issue of New Yorker) is an American classic which confronts this issue head-on.

There is a dimension in poetry which Ron, for all his genealogical & antiquarian research, knowledge, & passion, just does not get. & I know my own b-b-b-b-log is tedious with Ron-demurrals. Nevertheless I want to say it, just like I want to say, as an aside, that Louis Menand (in his essay in this week's New Yorker on the sociology of literature & prize-giving) does not get it, on a certain level.

What's wrong with Menand's very familiar thesis? The age-old mistake of the fore-brained philosophical proseur : to confuse the woman's dress & make-up with her physical beauty. Menand pretends to reduce art to power, commerce & good old ordinary human venality (how enlightened, how sophisticated, how worldly-wise, how regular-guy!). He forgets that the retail of literary commerce is rooted in the wholesale of aesthetic beauty; that the insane ego-trips, kultur-trips, money-trips & power-trips, which distort every human social interaction, don't actually touch or influence the formal elements of beauty (which are untouchable because formal - because rooted in nature) - elements that both the craft-work and the inspired genius of art are bound to emulate & reiterate.

& what do I want to say, again, about Ronville Sillimanville? What is it he doesn't get?

Ron reduces poetic history to a squabble between competing "schools". Essentially, this is a rationalization : a reduction of something which is more accurately, if more vaguely, termed "tradition".

Poetic tradition is ecumenical and welcoming : that is, membership is open to individuals from nowhere, everywhere. Yet once in the door, tradition is extremely demanding.

How so? Well, you cannot become part of the tradition by joining a school or a trend. In order to become part of the one great global tradition of poetry, you have to make poems. And poems are made with inspired poetic genius, gift, talent : because without these powers, the attainment of the particular order & beauty which inheres in poems is impossible.

Poetic beauty is so dense with articulate sensible conceptual order - like the synthesis of a coherent dream, raised to the nth degree - that its accomplishment is not available to the human will.

The literary theorizing which subjects poets & poems to the discourse of schoolish rivalries is similar to the Marxist narrow-mindedness which channels human industry & commerce into its particular video fantasy-battle between Good & Evil. That is, the model is inadequate to the complexity of the truth.

The poet is dedicated to the service of beauty; his or her productions bear witness to that dedication. This is not a board game to be judged by tyro-hobbyists.

I feel a big weight off my shoulders having produced the Lulu books. Sending out some review copies here & there. It's kind of amazing to me how it works. When I can afford it, I will improve the distribution channels even more.

This sort of thing is probably a big temptation to younger writers. It might be better to go through the editorial hoops for a while, the disappointments & the reality jolts. But I've been at it so long, & written so much, that I just want to shape it my own way now & put it out there.

Chapel Hill is a strange duck, a sort of semi-fictional memoir, or semi-memoirish fiction. One of the themes running through it is the idea of history as the work of a child's imagination. The contrast, the clash between historical "facts" and the beautiful & naive dreams which children make of them. A "coming-of-age" story, which circles around between history & family history, & fiction & poetry, in the mixed-up way of adolescent perception. Set in the 60s. About, among other things, two boys & their obsession with toy soldiers, & playing "war", while the older brother of one is off in Vietnam.

I started connecting this the other day with my recent reading in Vico. His way of thinking about the power of the human imagination (as it changes & develops) over cultural behavior. For Vico, according to Mazzotta anyway, "poetry is history" (& vice versa, I guess).

The seemingly innate drive people have, starting in childhood, to make sense of their experience, to recapitulate it, to turn it into story & history, to interpret it - to play with it. & the destiny of the poet & poetry : to judge the doings of individuals & nations through the prism of poetic speech. This seems like a source for both poetry's "seriousness" and its power to lighten & console.

This "historical" aspect of the poet's social role is undermined, sometimes, by so much acidic despair & scepticism, which often seems to turn contemporary poetry into intentionally vapid or superficial cadging & jokery. It's rare in poetry to find a fusion of both clear-sighted irony and hope.

If you want a model for engaged poetics, why keep looking at Olson & the grandfathers? Why not look at Sophocles? If you look at Sophocles long enough, you might see some interesting poets working NOW that you missed before.

A friend emailed to say how much he liked my awkward comments earlier this week about the anonymous, "un-literary" dimension of poetry's presence in the world. It reminded me somewhat of Kent Johnson's forthright criticism, in various places, of the merely theoretical-academic politicization of poetics. The distinction he draws between theory and actual civic-political realities is a sane & healthy one, I think.

The email also reminded me of this old poem, a little different from my usual. The last two lines say what I meant better than the blog comments did.

ARS POETICA

                              in memoriam W.W.

 
Walking over the bridge to the post office, the wind
raking trash against the steel fences, I saw a carpenter
hoist on a nonchalant frame of ropes and wood – intent,
healing a wounded wall, a gash of red bricks
curved like a crazy smile beneath an empty window.

 
Maybe this carpenter is cruel – rough, cold
to his children, beating his wife.  Maybe cheats
on his taxes, scams his customers; maybe
he harries gays and poets and femmes like me
in order to prove he can still get stiff,
or get those lingering rumors off his back
about his adolescence. . . maybe this man is evil,
in all the ways an old sinner like me can imagine.

 
The wind smashes newspapers, election notices
across the road, over the bridge wall.  The world
rages in throes of death and thirst echoing
over the tough skin of the rooftops – the scream
of an orangutan, stuffing a broken body up the shaft.

 
Scant light from a failing sun penetrates the clouds,
glows a little against the face of the wall.
Unexpected beauty, like this faint light
holds firm that workman on his floating planks.
Unheralded, unglorified, the earth is secret.
Mundane eloquence, whispered every day.

Ed Dorn's hyperbolic version of previous comment:

To a poet all authority
except his own
is an expression of Evil
and it is all external authority
that he expiates
this is the culmination of his traits.

Feeling a cold breeze blowing from blogland since my stance on the Houlihan brouhaha. The world is as small as the people in it. Though I was harsher than I should have been on Fence (every magazine has its mix of good & not-so-good) & on the poem Houlihan chose from it (still, sans the sarcasm, I think my evaluation of it was about right).

Josh Corey has some interesting musings on Atlantean communityhood. I am far more sceptical than he is. If membership in the true a-g requires some non-aesthetic political mutual understanding or allegiance (as per Steve Evans), that's fine, if you want to be political; but it's not worth selling out your poetry for it.

The poet, in my view, is working with an originary, primordial, anarchically free mode of speech, the special aptitude of which is to absorb & transmute everything (political, social, religious, aesthetic) that comes within its range. I'm not saying it transmutes all these things in reality : I'm saying that within its own sphere it remakes them into something else (poetry). The values of poetry that remain through time & historical change are centered in this originality : we don't value Whitman or Dickinson or WC Williams or Crane or Pound or Stevens or etc., for their political opinions or social commitments, but for the original force of their poetry, which synthesizes all the various social & ideological & intellectual & emotional elements into something rich & strange.

I've said it again & again & again & again (see especially the interview with Kent in Jacket #10). . the ideals & commitments of various social & political communities may be very noble & fine, but when they try to use these values & ideological formations to make claims on poetry, they exude, as Mandelstam put it, "the unclean goat-smell of the enemies of the Word."

[added later:] However, the notion of poetry cleansed isolated idealized iconized - as if it were a living entity and not a human creation - only sterilizes the notion of poetry & dehumanizes its cult-worshippers. What's the answer to that? The poet, as poet, expresses human feeling & thought & commitments & values through & within poetry; this process cannot be judged, channeled, manipulated, massaged, promoted, or controlled by anyone or anything outside it, without corrupting it & losing its essence. (Pantaloons, indirectly, reminded me of this.)

As for obscuritie poetickal, here's a somewhat oblique, Marvellian meditation on the social role of poetry (from Way Stations):

WATER MIRROR

 
  Hammersmith Farm, childhood home of the late Jacqueline 
   Kennedy Onassis, site of the reception for her wedding to 
   John F. Kennedy and his summer White House, is for sale.
        –Providence Journal-Bulletin (July 4, 1995)

            
                         1   
  
 They're selling off the old homestead,
 the mansion's on the auction block;
 the lawns where Jackie used to walk
 burrowed by realtors instead.
 Ten million bucks, it can be yours:
 the gardens, chandeliers, heirlooms,
 John-John and Caroline's bedrooms...
 Camelot flickers in the mirrors.

             
                         2
  
 From harbor frontage you can see
 four seasons glimmer in the surf,
 watch changeless flotsam crash, drift.
 Washington seems far away.
 There, a bigger sale is on:
 the common good, at discount rate,
 from state to corporate bureaucrat
 (by way of Senator Middleman).

            
                         3
  
 So why mold grief in pewtered rhyme
 for simple change, a mansion's fall?
 Irish rumrunners, after all –
 death by water.  A waste of time.
 A Yeats might mourn old manners gone,
 the shipwrecked dream of Camelot,
 and scorn the Newport plutocrat
 gnawing mahogany's snuffed grain...

            
                          4
  
 She's in the grave, the early girl,
 swan-woman (pillbox hat, pink coat) –
 sun-glassed, mysterious, remote,
 demure, still point of social whirl,
 who tacked astern with hasty Greek
 to homeward islands, east of West;
 she's gone, the akme of the best,
 a dolphin – gilded, guileless, sleek.

            
                         5
  
 But like a man who finds his wife
 locked in the arms of a stronger chest,
 I'm stung with song's unease, unrest –
 a uselessness, usurped by strife.
 Trajectories of melting ice;
 chaos of shards; an arctic herd
 shrinks (absurd equation) toward
 Time's backlit Death Row device

            
                          6
  
 and no one knows who killed the King
 or the two princes by his side –
 the talent that is death to hide
 cannot un-Gordian anything.
 Times are evil.  Redeem the day –
 that day he sat at Hammersmith
 and merged the Peace Corps with the myth:
 a green American sunray.

            
                         7
  
 Another Greek, Simonides
 (or so writes Roman Cicero)
 wove stories intricate and slow;
 his tyrant patron was displeased.
 "Lay off those Twins, you dunce"
 he cried – "Castor, Pollux –
 you're labored, prolix –
 recite my noble deeds, for once!"

            
                         8
  
 And tossing the poet only half –
 "Let those Gemini pay the rest!" –
 the prince expelled the fabulist.
 Then, in a glancing lightning shaft,
 two spooky boys were seen on high.
 Destruction rained down on his head.
 The bard survived, to name the dead –
 baptizing each guest with a sigh.

            
                         9
  
 Another house is up for sale.
 Driftwood clutters down the shore.
 No one listens anymore
 to songs of Camelot or Grail.
 But over the mortgaged property,
 over White House, pillar, dome,
 I see two ghostly brothers roam.
 Let slow strands weave their filigree.


      
                             7.8.95

Josh Corey responds (on 8/28) to my Theorie of Faculties Poetickal.

Josh, I think the idea of choosing a favorite tendency (pleasure-principled, or reflective/establishment, or irascible/engaged) is probably an illusion. Not because there is no free choice, but because tendencies are like symptoms (in a society of infinite & vast solipsism). Symptoms are sub-cultural, sub-aesthetic.

I think of the visionary or contemplative as an active process, not a mechanical reflection of "things as they are" (whatever that is). A work of finding relations & connections across varied & separate ranges of things & experiences. The visionary makes sense of history & contemporary reality through this process.

Whereas the "irascible" or engage tendency moves immediately from the "answer" to the persuasion; the answer is sort of assumed (an unjust state of things, for example). The visionary shows the state of things in their complexity.

On the plane back from Minnesota (seated amidst a beery wisecracking post-Labor Day Fife & Drum Band from Boston, going home), re-reading Carl Schorske's cultural history, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Hofmannsthal, poet & playwright, brooding over the relation of artist to society. A paradox : the moment the artist (the poet) arrogates the role of creating, rather than illustrating or ornamenting, culture, he or she becomes irrelevant.

We know the substance of the scandal : because of the injustice, corruption & militarism of the world political economy, that "tree of life" is watered with the blood & tears of the poor & oppressed. "Wisdom cries out in the streets" : even on the editorial page of the NY Times (see full-page editorial of Sunday, on the effect on the world's poorest farmers of agricultural subsidies in the rich nations).

But does this mean we must respond by pledging allegiance to some political faction, and then dilute & corrupt literary values in petty partisan checkers games - red/black, "mainstream/innovative", "quietude/post-avant"? Far from it. Poets will search simultaneously for the center of humane values, and for the spiritual and technical resources of the masterpieces in our language, which both emanate from and reflect that center (whether in terms of praise or rebuke, lyricism or satire, vision or jeremiad).

I sense one of those desiccated debates looming, that leave everyone feeling burnt-out. Will be brief, anyway, responding to Tim.

1) The quote from McClatchy is revealing; his defensive dismissal of the language poets et al. assumes a readership that even knows who they are, a readership which is extremely tiny. The forces of PR & publication & renown on both the "official" & the marginal wings are hyper-miniscule; the internal debate only highlights the extremely minor role poetry plays in the culture we have. The forces of fame & publication on either side of the mirror operate in exactly the same way; in both cases their impact is negligible. In this context, the official/marginal binary is merely a distraction from the real difficulties of making poetry.

2) The idea of a center of humane values is only a "red herring" if you can't see that center. The fact is there is a very basic social contract operating in most countries : a collectivity so basic, so domestic, so in front of our noses, that we sometimes fail to notice it. It goes something like this : if you work hard, get an education, take care of yourself & your family, you will do well. This kind of comment of course will invite all kinds of outcries along the lines of, well, what about these social injustices? My assertion was not, "there is a center, therefore the problems are unimportant." Remember, my assertion was: "corrections of injustices will come from the center of humane values".

3) Tim would like to portray my position as that of a deracinated aesthetician. I think it goes something more like this : politics is too important to be reduced to literary movement styles and phony frames of literary progress. By the same token, poetry is too essential to be subjected to the same partisan-ideological branding & feathering. In fact, poetry is too powerful to be confined by right-thinking intellectualizations or over-neat stylizations. It's powerful because rooted in experience, emotion and immediacy of perception; it's the working-out (through a desperate and often instinctive commitment to song) of conflicts which are too personal for abstract philosophical formulae; as Mandelstam emphasized, poetry is much more raw than prose. In making this argument I am leaving aside the most essential aspect, since raising it only instigates more arguments : poetry is an artistic activity, its effects operate on the aesthetic plane. Yes, the artist will be engaged in the social struggles which he or she inherits; yes, these will be reflected in the themes, styles, ethics of the art work; but, yet, & however, these social, political, philosophical beliefs and commitments, in the context of the art work, have no effect or meaning whatsoever, unless the art work is effective as art. How poetry works in this way is not something that can be explained by simple rules & instructions, or right-thinking ideological positions.*

*p.s. And these last two sentences, if you accept them, are the strongest argument for the poet's attention, not only to their private affinities, but to the tradition-at-large. The achievement of great poems is a general human achievement; they suffuse culture, take on a "second life", in Montale's sense; they are classics, in the sense that they open a door to general reception by means of their inherent quality. This general notion of classicism is perhaps something like what Mandelstam meant when he defined acmeism as "nostalgia for world culture". These classic achievements form a bond with that center of normative humane values which is civilization; the world culture Mandelstam wrote about in another place as that time when the worthless paper currency of the present (in his case, under Stalinism) is replaced by the ringing gold florins of a universal humanism, which will be passed from hand to hand. This same sense of wide, general heritage is what Brodsky was referring to when he wrote that "Man was put on the earth to make civilization."

Kasey weighs in.

Kasey, I think individualism is also a side issue here. The poetic process is perennial because it is a response to the basic human experience shared by everyone.

You ask for an example of the "historical narrative of literary progress" : the dominant one for the 20th century is what I described in previous post. The avant-garde literary project is a subset of an ideology. It is this ideological narrative which short-circuits the necessary (though not sufficient!) subjectivity of the poetic process.

Not fair to blame poets for the sad state of education, culture, politics. . .

& a lot of it isn't even sad.

Critical pincers.

writing poems
criticism
fame : 2 sides of the brain & a side of hash with croutons. A canna Makitcohere, chef.

Poem : indefensible heavy breathing. Quite an achievement in its own realm but easily dismissed.

Heavy breathing + acute hearing.

Patience & fortitude.

Careful with those pincers on onionskin graph paper.

Fair to be aware of the heavy angels on watch overhead : the angels of education, culture, politics. . . Miltonic sibillance on granite. . . Brodsky with a hawk on his wrist.

Reading Closing of the American Mind. A great jeremiad. If he's right (& he is right about a lot of things), poets are "performing" in the midst of an era of extreme cultural & educational decadence & misdirection. The so-called mainstream/oppositional distinction is meaningless in this environment, a tendentious distraction : we no longer remember or comprehend the role of reading in the enlightenment of "souls" (as Bloom puts it) or the sustenance of American culture.

I take back what I said in previous post. I don't care what other poets or celebrities do, they can protest all they like, all power to them.

If I protest, it will be as a citizen, not as a poet. Poetry will go where it will - maybe to protest too; but it's on its own.

Equanimity. Whereas many of the poets seem to feel their job is to express their political position these days. . . aren't a lot of these positions sort of like cultural habits? I mean you're on the "left" or the "right" since you were in diapers, you express "where you come from" etc. Parochialism. What if the job instead is to penetrate into a complex reality, without taking sides so much as to illuminate the dynamics? Not only a political reality but a purely poetic reality at the same time. I feel like a lot of the easy rhetoric actually does a disservice to poetry, all these poets against the war, it's like celebrities against the war, riding on something that doesn't belong to them. Not that they're not citizens : it's that they take their ART for granted, their artist status. Meanwhile poetry has gone off somewhere else.

Jordan. . . I guess it's not the dream part that bothers me, it's the Dismantle. As I contemplate the dust storm of poetry list & blog political talk, I see mostly sterile, self-righteous, ignorant condemnations, by people who don't recognize or understand the values that sustain our own culture. It's a closed spiral of capitalism, globalism, militarism, Americanism, according to them : and they themselves are the flip side of the Rush Limbaugh US-right-or-wrong spouters. Both apply a utopian perfectionism in order to sit in judgement - one says America is always right, the other America is always wrong. It's a kind of rigid thinking. Unable to comprehend that politics is the art of the possible, and that we have to also look at societies laterally, comparatively, not just from a vertical superior position.

I'm part of a study group at my church. We're looking at Papal encyclicals on social life over the last 100 yrs or so. There are several consistent principles or themes over time, centering around the inherent dignity of the human being. Some of the economic principles struck me : such as the idea that labor & capital need each other, and need to find common ground; also the idea that the right to own property is a basic right & a social good, though it is a right that is qualified by the common good and by the responsibilities of stewardship. These are deep & pervasive global ideas, which the superficial anti-capitalist conspiracy mentality cannot understand.

Most of the so-called conscientious protest I read on the poetry sites strikes me as mental ignorance & complacency. It's a kind of glorying in marginality, and the irony is that those who spend their hours & years in fussy ressentiment, rather than doing something useful for themselves or their world, are the most parochial types of all.

They are like people under attack who close their eyes & hope the badness will go away, while shouting imprecations at their own defenders.

They are like people thundering "Wait! We know better! Dismantle this society & remake it according to my dreams!"