The New Athenians: A Manifesto in Search of a Generation of New Poets & Poems

What follows below was received in my Inbox this morning. The anonymous senders threatened to pelt my four year old son with potatoes if I did not post their manifesto. I love my son, so here goes:

The New Athenians: A Manifesto
You stand face to face with your counterpart, opposition, comrade, member of your generation; on the edge of an ocean. The ground on which you stand erodes and winds blow the waves closer to the impermanent jetty. Those who came before lived in a time of a different language, different predecessors, and different wars. Those who are emerging after us are being fed and infiltrated with so many images and newsfeeds that they are at risk of imploding, crumbling within themselves. This is the threat, the isolation that accompanies the individualism that our technological age has forced upon us. Yet here we stand.
We stand as the New Athenians, with one foot in the old, one foot in the new. We have been given the power to make changes as we exist on the edge of time, much like the old Athenians. We cannot turn to individualism; we need each other (to make this work). We will use the means of communication, real communication. No IM’s, no “texts,” but words from human lips. The human script is rapidly eroding. Soon will be obsolete one’s own mark, one’s own autograph, one’s own voice -- the caveman within us dead evermore.
As poets, The New Athenians surrender all that is digital and engage the human. We collectively stand up and walk away from the machines in our lives and abandon what seems so comfortable. Put yourself at ocean’s edge, where nothing is as safe as it was, but everything is vivid and real: you, the ocean, a pencil, and sheet of paper. On the other side, another human awaits your message, written by your own hands.
As taxing as this separation from the digital may seem, we have even more work ahead of us to eradicate the individualism we see as rampant in American poetry. From day one our generation has faced little more than scorn from all of those who came before us. These saints from on high spare no opportunity to decry what they call our “electronically induced apathy.” Their contempt spills from the mouths of all the teleprompted talking heads, and they invade our every waking moment. They ceaselessly allege and point to our inability to relate to each other without the assistance of a digital crutch - something that invariably sends the best minds among them off to wax philosophically about the ‘fragmentation of the self’ and other such nonsense, and they never tire of pointing out all the ways that our myriad, technological luxuries help keep our dreams boxed up in neat little stacks and rows.
The haughtiest of their lot claims our brains are so busy trying to compute all the images coming through the screens that we have become utterly alienated from the world around us, and have taken refuge in the most vulgar forms of solipsistic individuality. Aloof from our peers; aloof from our families; aloof from society; besieged on all sides by the loneliness that afflicts the long distance runner: weary, sore, and isolated.
Our generation does not fit into any of these molds. That no matter how hard they try to force us into these pretty little archetypes that they have built, using scraps pulled from this country's collective memory, we will never be (and never have been) so apathetic as they imagine us to be. No matter how many times they try to tell us otherwise, we will never be (and never have been) ‘fractured,’ ‘fragmented,’ and ‘incapable of knowing who we really are.’ From the peripheries of our beleaguered society, our generation has been calling out to be heard. From graffiti on every bathroom wall in a truck-stop, fast-food hell to the rhymes we spit in schoolyards, playgrounds, and cafeterias, our generation has been screaming out, yet, thus far, no one has heard us because we have lacked a voice. No longer.
We've had enough of feeling like we've been left out in the wind to die in the dust without a single ear turned in our direction, without a single open mind to pay us heed; all that we have lacked is a sense of direction and a voice, a form, with which to shout.
Today, we shout as New Athenians. We boldly declare that this is our voice, The New Athenian poem, a conversational poem, and we speak now. But how will we communicate? Will we stand in front of the other like a leaf on a late October branch, fearing the winds that are inevitable while our counterpart looks on like a brick wall, words barely leaving the realm of our interior, thoughts turning inwards? Thusly, we advocate for poems as conversations.
The inquisitive nature of conversational poetry seeks to grab onto extroverted notions that are lost with narcissistic individuality. Our poems will address issues and will break the monotony of everyday-speak, evident and spilling from the lips of predictable presidential candidates and foreign news correspondents, who do not lead or inform, but merely spout status quo, poll-driven, capitalistic idea-advertisements. The New Athenian poem will be built upon sincerity, upon a passing word with a stranger or a long conversation with a friend; in any event, our poems will explore the intentions of our words and what they really express, what problems we seek to solve, collectively. When the product of our poem is the advancement towards Truth, we have become New Athenians.
The New Athenian poem seeks ways to destroy misconceptions pinned onto our generation from without. We could yell until our throats bleed; we could hurl literary missiles at the heavens; we could even dogmatically espouse some unique ideology that could counter all of the philosophical nonsense forced down our throats by the Derridas of the world. We could do all of that, but by way of a much more simple form. Our goal is to soak up the world around us in all of its staggering profundity, and to rage tirelessly against its more loathsome features -- possible and achievable only after we have escaped the confines of the stifling, digital affectations and banalities that have weighed us down and defined us. Thus, we start is in the way we talk to one another.
By practicing poetic, social exchange, this basic means of communication which formed the building blocks of human civilization, we seek to break our generation free from the tangle of wires that fasten us to our computer chairs. By speaking with one-another, or with ourselves, or even with the plethora of objects and things all around us, we seek to explode the notion of the hopelessly fragmented world left for us by all those erudite postmodern critics. By merely talking, we seek to demonstrate that there is logic to the way the generation thinks, and it is entirely dependent on the world outside of us and within us.
Youth's bitter exile still fresh in our mouths, we stalk about our generation's so-called wasteland, a landscape riddled with fiber-optics, wires, wireless emotions, the pot-marked scars of digitally induced alienation. We start our swim across the ocean with a word and rise up for air, to show ourselves in the dawn of a new era, a new consciousness emerging from the layers of the information age. The age will not define us. We look up from the monitor's glow for the last time and begin an end to our linguistic and emotional decay.