THE JOLLYROGER.COM GREAT BOOKS BREWERY & JOLLYROGER.COM'S FIRST POETRY COLLECTION: ETERNITY IN A GRAIN OF SAND Tell yer friends about the Jollyroger.com Renaissance! Order From Fatbrain.com! THE MOST PERFECT SILENCE by Drake Raft I know where the most perfect silence is, Seen it in the wild blue off Hatteras, A mile out, rainbowed sails in silent bliss, Looked like they'd collide, but they safely passed. I know when the most perfect silence is, Down a dusty Ohio road, high noon, No shirt on, being burned by the sun's kiss, Sixteen, taking my time--it was still June. I know what the most perfect silence is, It's what we say when falling out of love, It roars and thunders right through the kiss, Says all that no words can ever speak of. I know why the most perfect silence is, It is there for the whisper to be born, The whisper in her ear became the kiss, Just a dream in DC early one morn. I know who the perfect silence is for, It is for the ones whom we love the best, It is there to protect them from our core, By the silent trust we all seek to rest. And I know how rare that silence can be, With everyone talking, it's hard to hear, But I know I felt it, on the streets of DC, The sound in her eyes--it was crystal clear. And it brought back to mind the rainbowed sails, And the way it looked like they would collide, Like two souls set upon fate's iron rails, But the most perfect silence never died. ETERNITY IN A GRAIN OF SAND (WYOMING IN MANHATTAN) by Becket Knottingham Flew out of Charlotte to go spread the word, I'd heard trying to sleep through the spring thunder, As the stormy March sky drew lightning's sword, I dreamed it was God beginning to wonder. And I dreamed I was captain of a ship, I dreamed of a loyal crew about me, Sailing the world wide web at a great clip, With my soul's keel thundering across the sea. And I dreamed poetry rhymed once again, And they were building marriages to last, That lovers set flowing verse down in pen, Children didn't have to grow up so fast.       And when I awoke, I saw it could be,       I could break through the fog with poetry. So I packed my pack with some old sonnets, And bought a ticket to New York City, A fisher of men, from words I weave nets, Bid farewell to the Southern spring so pretty. And I watched America's city recede, As I rose in the Carolina blue, And I recalled all we ever really need, Are those deep-down things that we always knew. Away up there--I'd never felt so free, The tide was turning, and this was my chance, No denying what spring'd thundered to me, Beyond the fog I'd glimpsed a renaissance.       I wanted peace, but I knew it would take war,       To gain the eternal soul's pristine shore. For I knew well the cynics' cruel weapons, How postmodernists kill with irony, But yet, their best--it only ever stuns, While they burn so fast in rhyming beauty. To gain the rainbow you must know the storm, And fierce, dark clouds swirled rain at JFK, It's only by winter that spring is warm, And a cold March wind blew through the subway. The Taxi driver said he did not know, Where Central Park's ducks went in the winter, But my friend was in Cats, and after the show, We went out in Chelsea and I asked her.       But before she could answer, she was high,       She'd given up--didn't even know why. And if someone has to go it alone, If it's for poetry, I'll volunteer, If somebody has to remain unknown, Then I'll take the helm, you can stay right here. For working for money's too great a risk, A poet doesn't need an IPO, For the same wind that carries truth shall whisk these poems about the globe, and all shall know. Out here the internet's not 'bout money, And words aren't about building a brand, Beyond the irony where one can see, The eternity in a grain of sand.       And if, and if I can show it to you,       It's only because this you always knew. An undercover rebel, on the run, Amongst the tourists touring through Time's Square, With the dazzling lights brighter than the sun, It could be hard to hear her solemn prayer. For something a little bit deeper now, For a promise, a promise that would last, For an ideal a bit higher than the Dow, Which would endure when all else joined the past. I didn't say it, but I saw it there, Deep within, behind her soft, subtle eyes, And to say it, you know I didn't dare, For I was undercover, in disguise.       It was too dangerous to write her a line,       For in New York rhyming truth is a crime. Then I was on the Tribecca rooftop, Found her again, though she was someone new, I wanted to go slow, wanted to stop, And talk about all that we had been through. And it's hard to describe a pretty girl, There're so many levels, but I love the eyes, Ageless and timeless, they'll never unfurl, And deeper beauty in honesty lies. But then I heard they were looking for me, A posse of postmodern editors, With their deputy critics after me, And I saw feminists guarding the doors.       Outnumbered again, couldn't stand my ground,       And then I was gone when she turned around. But in the East Village, I forget when, Saw her again, pretty's easy to find, She couldn't tell--I don't carry a pen, But I write the poetry in my mind. And it's funny how someone can hold you, Without touching, but only with their eyes, A smile, hearkening back to something true, Wished I could stay, but I'd blow my disguise. Then I'm lost--the Soho fog's gotten thick, My friends all gone, walking night's streets alone, Where Hope feels like a candle's dying wick, And on the wind you can hear Faith's voice blown.       She whispers, "my friend, my friend, I believe,       For poetry's death I also do grieve." And can't you see that it's all connected? Rhyme, meter, romance, this great New York night, That when our faith in God is neglected, Life loses meaning and love becomes trite. And I know that that was why she told me, That today's poetry means naught to her, The elite modern poets think they're free, But life's a prison without honest prayer. Then it's midnight, drinking wine with dinner, With two pretty girls from Mississippi, Then it's 3 A.M., and she's sitting near, On a piano bench in the City.       And I dared not speak when she leaned too close,       Played Pachabel's Canon, maintained my pose. I think I saw a ring on her finger, Felt the romance of what would never be, And how those we never kiss can linger, The lost moment becomes eternity. It was just before dawn when I realized, That she had never given me her name, So pretty sleeping, but she was disguised, In hiding our hearts, we both were the same. I guess we'd just heard it too many times, Romance must die so cynicism can live, Tired of being persecuted for our crimes, We hid our judgment, asked God to forgive.       "My name's Wyoming," she awoke to say,       Then closed those sky eyes, and drifted away. Late night Madison Ave. when ghosts arise, Saw one over St. Patrick's Cathedral, I ducked in the Waldorf, and closed my eyes, And the sweet angel, she began to fall. Followed me into the Helmsley Hotel, All the extravagance and fineries, Were a wooden frame to a Southern Belle, Wearing all black, she could kill with such ease. When you think of Venus she comes to mind, And all the Met's paintings--they can't compete, But I knew, I knew she could make me blind, To the task I had come here to complete.       I'd learned the art of writing poetry,       To pen rather than touch her mystery. Stood on her balcony, looking out West, And she came up behind me, took my hand, Said she knew the feeling--she couldn't rest, When there were things she couldn't understand. From Midtown, I could hear the West calling, But I don't think it was Silicon Valley, And in Manhattan the culture was falling, Resounding throughout Silicon Alley. And I wasn't all that sure, where to go, Editors, VCs, they'll never believe, In anything they don't already know, But I knew, I knew it was time to leave.       And in the dawn's fog, I saw three tall masts,       He who signs aboard shall be he who lasts. And the great ship docked on her balcony, Flying a skull'n'bones, armed to the teeth, I climbed aboard, and Wyoming joined me, Headed West as New York awoke beneath. And though I'd come to talk to editors, It'd turned out I just didn't have the time, To walk the fog down there, knocking on doors, I'd been too busy dancing with New York's rhyme. And so often it is that when we roam, The new sights are things we see in ourselves, It's on the road that we finally find home, The poems in her heart were but closed books on shelves.       In silicon I saw eternity,       And the Jolly Roger--she set us free. The Great Books of The Western World Tell yer friends about this page & the Jollyroger.com Renaissance!

THE JOLLY ROGER GREAT BOOKS BREWERY
NOW OPEN IN SAN FRANCISCO & SILICON VALLEY
GREAT BOOKS & COFFEE ALL DAY, GREAT BOOKS & BREW ALL NIGHT

And I knew the silent sentiment now in reality as I had known it then in a dream--jollyroger.com was the flagship of the WWW Renaissance. It was a pretty magnificent brewery, with over a million dollars worth of great copper tanks and tubing, capable of producing dozens of fine beers, from Blackbeard's Brew, to Pirate's Pale Ale, to Crow's Nest Cider. And the funny thing was was that it was all kind of beside the point--it was all an advertisement for jollyroger.com's first collection of poetry--Eternity in a Grain of Sand: The Most Perfect Silence of Jollyroger.com Poetry (1995-2000). I never even really drank all that much, to tell you the truth, and I would've been just as content building a church. But there was a greater chance of introducing this generation to the Word on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights than there was on Sunday mornings.

We hadn't put that part in the business plan, that the center and circumference of jollyroger.com was and would always be poetry, as we'd learned that the mere mention of literary aesthetics elicited pompous shrugs from the silicon Venture Capitalists. Whenever we started talking about the glorious opportunity the internet presented to the rising generation to captain a cultural renaissance, to return reason, rhyme, and meter to poetry, to live richer lives in the context of the Great Books, they'd yawn. They were almost as bad as the postmodern editorial elite in that regard--although whereas VC's didn't mind making an honest buck now and then, the New York editorial elite would rather lose money following their offline egos than make money by publishing and promoting the words of a Renaissance. They had a chip on their shoulder, and it wasn't a Pentium. At least the VCs didn't hate us for reasoning like Jefferson and rhyming like Shakespeare. They were just indifferently aloof because they didn't see the money, at first.

The dominant cultural leaders of the passing era haven't been all that good at appreciating the practical beauty of the classics and God, although the Divine Traditions are from where all true, lasting wealth derives. Life without Honor isn't life, and so many of the eminent boomers have joined the walking dead, with all the institutions they touched now rotting on the inside, from marriage, to the New Yorker, to the Universities, to the Presidency, leaving but a characterless, soulless facade for all the postmodernists and pagans to fall on their knees and worship. But literature without Honor isn't as easy as politics without Honor, and thus while they sat high on the thrones of popular culture, they would have no place in Eternity. So it is that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Upon the back of every dollar is written "In God We Trust," so how much would all their paper stock options be worth if God's Truths were forgotten?

The girl from Indiana--I hadn't told you this yet, but she was kinda beautiful in that free-spirited sort of way which is sometimes confused with grrrrl power, but which is really just a deeper reverence for life's greater mysteries--that profoundly American sentiment of noble indepedence, which in its correct form is expressed in sublime virtue, and in its corrupted form expressed in grrrrrl power debauchery as dark as the prisitine virtue is white. I'd known a few of them, and I know of one that I'd saved. She'd been wearing these black pants, and I'd asked her if they were on backwards, because they had those two back pockets in the front, kind of, and she'd said, "No! You think I'm Kris Cross?" And that's right about when I fell in love. She was pretty drunk, but she had the Kris Cross moves down. She had to be pretty old to remeber Kris Cross.

For the past five years the WWW has allowed Jollyroger.com's patented Great Books sentiments to sail freely about the globe, unimpeded by small socialist committees and elite culture clubs, and with the seeds now sown, it has become feasible to open Great Books Breweries, and Classicals Coffee Shops, and Jollyroger.com Piano & Poetry Pubs across the fruited plane. And as we open these lighthouses in every state, each one shall become a physical manifestation of the original online beacon, and enable the renaissance fleet of the rising generation's souls to navigate beyond the postmodern fog. I hope to see each and every one of ye there, fellow voyagers aboard the Good Ship. Spread the word far and wide that our fleet shall be coming to town, wherever these words are read.

The major universities and popular culture had unanimously rejected the regal spirit of the classics, thereby creating an immense dearth in the free marketplace of ideas, and thus people shall welcome these new institutions of higher learning. For at the end of the day, the mark of humanity is that we want to stand before God and know the Words of Truth which set us all Free.

During the intense negotiatons preceding the final term sheet, it always rubbed me the wrong way when I heard the VCs associating the word "risk" with jollyroger.com, for there was no risk involved--we were prepared to do anything and everything to make her succeed, whether as a novel, a collection of essays, a website, a brewery, a coffee shop, a press, a community, a screenplay, or even a collection of poetry. They didn't comprehend living one's life for poetry, of investing not mere money, but one's entire soul--and so we were discreet. The only place the concept of "poetry" actually appeared in the business plan was where we decreed that Elliot, Becket, and I would retain full rights and ownership to all jollyroger.com literature, past, present, and future. We figured they wouldn't miss it. And they didn't.

Basically we got the VC's to put up twenty million dollars without giving up any equity in jollyroger.com's greatest asset--poetry. Initially they were offering about ten million to sign aboard, but we all knew that they needed jollyroger.com's eternal brand more than jollyroger.com needed their money, so we held out for double the initial offer, for which we gave them twenty percent ownership of jollyroger.com, minus all the poetry. We knew we had an Ace in the hole, as you can only get so much mileage out of high-tech pyramid schemes, before you just have to invest in something profound. Out in Silicon Valley one often hears that there's too much money chasing too few good ideas, but since when has a good idea needed money? How much VC did Thoreau raise so as to write Walden, which opens with a section entitled Economy:

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. --Henry David Thoreau

By and by we learned the art disguising the renaissance as a dot com business and a coffee shop and a brewery. And that's why I wanted to find that girl from Indiana again, to tell her the more secretive and profound nature of this project. I didn't even know her, but I wanted to tell her that divorce wasn't all that mandatory away out here, that living with one's heart and soul dedicated to the higher ideals was the source of a far higher freedom than the postmodern freedom which was so popular, the freedom from the higher ideals which enslaved one to the cynicism. I'd never seen the Grand Canyon, and she'd reminded me that I wanted to. She'd reminded me that hope is what keeps us forever young, and that vigilantly following Truth's beaty to the ends of this earth is what allows us to hope.

Becket, Elliot, and I had perceived that the popular culture worshipped money at the deeper soul's expense, and thus we were going to have to make a lot of cash pretty quickly so as to get our poetry to show up on our peer's radar. In order to teach we were going to have to quit our professorships and serve up coffee and beer, as even the small college I'd taught at had held money in higher regard than the spirit of the Great Books. More than one of the professors had had a TV in their office playing CNNFN all day long, with all those pretty analysts full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. In order to introduce poetry within the ivied halls, we were going to have to get jollyroger.com's ticker symbol up there, rolling across the bottom of the screen.

As a new professor, I had had to attend a week of orientation, and at every session the speaker would trumpet the size of the college's endowment. I kept waiting for them to acknowledge ideals higher than the bottom line, to quote Plato, or Socrates, or Jefferson, to acknowledge the vast and glorious monuments of wisdom which it was our duty to introduce the students to. In addition to the student's average SAT scores and the college's ranking in U.S. News and World Report, I kept waiting to hear things like:

"Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816.

"Light and liberty go together." --Thomas Jefferson to Tench Coxe, 1795.

"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Madison Version

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. . . . One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? --Thoreau, Walden Pond

The New New thing shall always be the eternal, but they didn't seem to teach that anywhere in the postmodern curriculum, as too many small minds had benefited in the deconstruction and decline, and they'd risen to positions of prominence, from where they handed one another great distinctions, awards, and honors, while inflating the grades of all who brown-nosed them. I suppose the MBAs could've figured out the score on their own, if they'd ever read the classics, but they didn't. Had they'd read the classics, they would've known that Thoreau had also written:

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. . . . However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

And as I stood there against the wall, looking for the girl from Indiana that I'd already lost in the first few moments of this Jollyroger.com brewery, I began to wonder just how many at the opening night party could hear the sublime silence of the approaching storm. From face to face of the dancing strangers my gaze wandered, looking for echoes of the profound quietude amongst the Wired reporters and the Salon.com crowd we'd invited--could they hear the renaissance's rising wind? There was Bill Joy from Sun Microsytems who'd recently penned that in a few years man would be replaced by machines, from which I had to conclude that he'd never understood the Declaration of Independence, nor the Gospels, nor Shakespeare, to believe that a machine could create such beauty. Technologists were always creating God in their own image, and thus it was a God without poetry. How about John and Samantha--our new venture capitalist friends? Could they hear the most perfect silence? They were fresh out of Stanford business school, and they were now working with Weston, Smith & Remington--they'd just put up millions for the jollyroger.com piano & poetry pubs, and I'm not sure they even knew what iambic pentameter was. It was pretty funny. John was standing there with his hand on Samantha's ass--he kept patting her to the rhythm of Jack Daniels Salinger, and it was getting on my nerves--Samantha was pretty hot, wearing a short dress, and trashed too, but it probably would've gotten on my nerves anyway. And he wasn't just tapping her--John was banging the hell out of her, like she was a bongo. And this wasn't even the IPO party or anything.

It didn't take a genius to see that if you let the MBA's and venture capitalists stand at the helm for too long, Jollyroger.com would turn into just another postmodern cash-burning dot-com joke or something. It was kinda funny watching them navigate out of their natural element of financing high-tech pyramid schemes. It'd been John's idea to get Jack Daniel's Salinger--he'd known the lead singer Ryan back during his Stanford undergrad years--Ryan was some sort of a rebel because he conformed to all the sixties codes of dress, and he had a bunch of crap in his face. He looked like Stewart from those Ameritrade ads, and John wanted to give the band stock options to become the official jollyroger.com band, but we were able to talk him out of it.

Becket and Elliot and I had planned on hosting a poetry reading on the opening night of the Jollyroger.com Great Books Brewery, but John had told us they'd be expecting us to rock, so we were going to get our band Drake's Raft together, and then have a poetry reading anyway, but then John went ahead and hired his own bands. He was afraid we'd do something cool, like read sonnets. John was a good guy, and he knew everything and more about NPATs and IPOs and structuring ownership and equity and vesting, and he'd read thousands upon thousands of business plans, but that's no way to build a soul. I didn't quite get it--John understood that the most perfect silence was attracting people, and yet as soon as his firm had invested in it, he wanted to shout over it. We were kinda off to a bad start, but at least they were paying for it. And at least John hadn't hired William Shatner for the opening night gig.

Not only did we have the shareholder's interests to protect, but we also had the reader's. And thus I was relieved that John had won out over Samantha. When she'd heard that we wanted to do a poetry reading, she'd scheduled David Foster Wallace--her sister was in one of his creative writing classes. It seemed like the VCs were intent on making us a non-profit organization--jollyroger.org. They were kind of dot-communists in that way--profits weren't important in their postmodern economy, in the same way rhyme, meter, and meaning were no longer important in postmodern poetry. It was everyone's duty to buy into it, to believe the postmodern hype, to line the VC's pockets in the postmodern pyramid schemes where profits and Truth and value and law and reason and order no longer mattered. It was an inside joke, of course, as profits mattered very much to the VC's--they just advertised that profits didn't matter so they could make vast profits when the public bought into the hype during the IPO, assuming all the risk of a profitless company that was once assumed by the VCs. And make no mistake--the tenured postmodern elite believe very much in law and order, as far as it preserves their own freedom and paychecks. They believe very much that words mean things every time they get in their tax and tuition subsidized BMW's and drive to work--they want you to stop at all the stop signs.

Like the educational administrators, the spreadsheet bureaucrats didn't understand the vast value of God-inspired poetry, and that's why we were able to retain full ownership. They didn't understand that when all the castles built on silicon crumbled to the sea, there'd yet be poetry. They thought that because they understood how to lose vast sums of money, they understood how to run a business, just as modern pedants thought that because they could opine, they could teach, that because they could deconstruct they could create. They thought that because they could invest in poetry, they could write it. Such is the common disposition of those who have never seen action on the frontlines of creativity and entrepreneurship--those who have never sailed in the first principles' wind nor been inspired by higher Truths in an Indiana girl's smile, but have only ever worked in the shadow of the bottom line. They'd never been in the line of fire and come out alive by baring their soul with eloquence. They'd never built anything from the ground up for the sake of beauty's inspiration alone. They'd never lost themselves in a moment of eternity, and then turned around and found eternity in the moment.

And as Jack Daniels Salinger played on and the brew flowed, I got that same feeling that I often get before I write--I felt like I had to get away. The Great Books Brewery was rapidly changing into one of those places that I was always wanting to leave so as to walk the streets and set down a poem or two. A prophet will not be known in his own home, it has been said, and I'll admit I was beginning to feel like Odysseus, when he returned home after his years of adventure on the high seas to find everyone partying in his house, hitting on his wife. And like Odysseus, I too was in disguise, for nobody knew of the most perfect silence thundering through my soul. We'd been so good at dressing jollyroger.com as a dot-com brewery that sometimes the poetry was hard to see, but beneath the mask she was transporting the WWW Renaissance. And all we had to do was wait for time herself to engrave her deeper nature upon eternity.

Time is far more valuable than venture capital when it comes to poetry, as time alone can erode and conquer the mighty administrator's ego, the proud man's contumely, the inflated value of a worthless company, the politician's rhetoric, the false prophet's blasphemies, the cultural elite's insignificant art which elevates the ambitious critic by its utter meaninglessness, and replace them all with the poetry that means something to tomorrow's children.

And as the crowd danced on to Jack Daniels Salinger, I knew that Becket and Elliot were thinking the same exact things--Becket was standing there totally bored, with his girlfriend Wyoming, but I couldn't see where Elliot had wandered off to--he'd probably taken off to go walk the streets. I laughed when it hit me--he'd probably taken off with the girl from Indiana--there weren't all that many to go around. This was turning into just another dot-com café, another good-time rock'n'roll Starbucks, and there was nothing I could do, but stand and watch John playing the bongos.

And then with a blinding flash and a deep crack of thunder I felt in my bones before I heard it, the power went out. I saw the lightning's jagged blue fork touch down just outside the window, and the band went silent and the room went black. And in a moment people began cheering and getting their lighters out. I remembered the boxes of candles we'd bought but hadn't had time to set up on all the tables, and I hopped behind the bar, found them, and started passing them out.

And suddenly Becket was up on the stage.

"All-right everyone. This was all part of the schedule here. We're going to do a poetry reading now. As many of you well know, we just published our latest book, Eternity in a Grain of Sand: The Most Perfect Silence of Jollyroger.com Poetry (1995-2000). So if I can invite Drake Raft up here to kick it off--there he is--to kick it off with a poem he wrote awhile back, which kinda started all this. The Most Perfect Silence."

And how I wish you could have been there for what followed. I read the opening poem, and then Becket read on for over half an hour to the most perfectly silent crowd, most of them holding candles, and sitting on the hardwood floor. And as I stood there, I felt a presence beside me. It was the girl from Indiana. And I leaned on towards her as she started saying something, and it'd been so long since I'd lost myself in a natural, soft kiss--one of those melting high school ones--which was brief, like the soul of wit, but which would endure forever in memory.

"Thanks," she said, smiling, surprised, "I really could use that." I didn't really know what to say either.

And we just stood there and enjoyed the rest of Becket's show, sharing the most perfect silence of not quite knowing each other's names. And how I wish the man who'd called us from Alaska and left a message on the jollyroger.com voice mail a few weeks ago could've been there. "I'm calling from Alaska here, America's final frontier--my wife turned me on to your site--she's the surfer in our house--I'm fired up to see what you youngsters are doing. God bless you." He hadn't left a name nor a number. And how I wish the thousands of jollyroger.com crew members could've been there, as all the poetry had been written with them in mind. For it was the constant, favorable wind of their email responses by which jollyroger.com had sailed so far so fast. They weren't deans, nor professors, nor investment bankers, nor prominent VCs, nor high cultural officials, but they were the true owners of poetry--the people who read it, enjoyed it, and lived it in the most perfect silence of our comprehension of those mysteries greater than ourselves. And to all of ye, I dedicate this Great Books Brewery, and all the poetry that lines her deeper decks, past, present, and future.

God bless ye, and God bless America.

Hello,

I wanted to know, who is Becket Knottingham? Also, in this last poem he/she implied that he/she was not a post-modernist. I would like to know, What Becket Knottingham considers himself/herself to be?

If you would, please let me know!

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Heather Foster
student at The University of Southern Mississippi

THE CAPTAIN RESPONDS: Becket Knottingham is one of the three sonneteers.