The Guerilla Poetics Project

David Oprava

Born in America at a time before Disco had reared its soulless head and Vietnam was still burning holes in the American heart, I grew up in a time of bad clothes, worse music, and the death of a nation's innocence. I always thought that time shaped me as a child cast into a plastic world that was still trying to find its own boundaries after the paradigm of the 50's dream collapsed. Growing up in the Northeast I was cosmopolitan in the sticks and an uncouth erudite amongst the many who had lost ambition. At a callow age I ran to New england to be schooled by the seasons and to absorb the ministrations of the liberal, well meaning blue bloods. Suckled there I came away long haired, free thinking, and imbued with a sense of infallable destiny. In some ways, that has never left me. Although, now in my fourth decade, I see the world through a more mature, tainted, broken, and misting lens.

The more convoluted life has become, the more I find myself looking for one thing: beauty. Not necessarily in the classical forms of poetry, flowers, art, etc. but rather in the mundane, the dark, the everyday. I like the concept of beauty being more than just a perception, rather a feeling. If we see something that is beautiful, it is dependent on the light to illuminate it for us. My quest is to find those things that need no light to radiate and no sound to be heard in ones mind as they explore the essence and innate nature of what is beauty.