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NEW MEDIA MANIFESTOWe are a movement of engagement. Always engaged. We articulate our participation in a culture, in an economy, in a particular country, now.We are aware of what is done in our name as citizens, as neighbors, as consumers, as employers, as employees….We are dedicated to be present now.We encounter through the filters of the media the language of Medicare, Insurance Companies, Wall Street, Pharmaceutical Companies, the IRS, the IMF, the Military, The Administration, The Supreme Court…. And we own their language as ours. We write from where we exist, from how we live.And still we grapple with the official languages of media as well as poetry. We grapple with those languages that present themselves as transparent, benign, universal and clear-seeing.We see, know, and live within with the understanding that we are here. Nature includes all that we see and hear along with the chirping.Reminded by newspapers, radio, television, magazines, journals, the internet, advertisements and by our own eyes and ears, we understand knowledge to be experience.We are in response to all that happens, all that is. We are not interested in differentiating ourselves from anyone. We are not interested in being original. Many see and write as we do. Many exist closer to that which we squint to make out. Still we are here.WHAT IS is our environment. The environment of our poems can go anywhere at once.
We don’t believe that saying one is “outside” or “in opposition” puts one outside a system or system of systems and therefore we write from the inside out. We acknowledge and embrace our collusion in hope, without hope. We are frauds and misleading as we exist inside the fraudulent and misleading. We are not an answer. We are in response.We understand that prepositions rule and so read into, beyond, beneath and between lines. We are here.We are topically graphic. We see beauty in nouns and names, proper and otherwise: Tiger Woods. We want, to paraphrase Robert Duncan, every part of our actual worlds involved in our escape.We are here. We refuse to be lonely. We cannot write as if we are not a part of now. Nothing we write can take us out of here. We refuse the simulacra of cultural alienation.We are here now. We are intimate with this world.We know these names to be within the perimeters of poetic: Amadou Diallo. Timothy McViegh. Nike. Mad Cow Disease. George W. Bush. John Ashcroft. Microsoft. The Rwanda Four. The World Bank….We know we can never be divorced from here. We write from inside the recording. We arise from the reportage.