Editorial Philosophy and Aims

Our attitude and integrity as artists are very important. We need to encourage and nourish the notion that we are not going to yield to the neurotic world. Inch by inch, step by step, our efforts should wake peo­ple up through the world of art rather than please everyone and go along with the current. It might be painful for your clients or your audience to take the splinter out of their system, so to speak. It probably will be quite painful for them to accommodate such pressure coming from the artist's vision. However, that should be done, and it is necessary. Otherwise, the world will go downhill, and the artist will go downhill also.

“State of Mind,” True Perception, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

As indicated on its “About” page, Texas Poetry Assignment intends to inspire community through hunger relief and poetry. 

To inspire community through hunger relief, TPA has established opportunities to recognize our responsibilities to those who needlessly suffer from food insecurity, specifically through donations to Feeding Texas, the largest hunger-relief organization in Texas. Together with twenty-one food banks, they reach over four million Texans annually with food and resources, and they engage the state in the fight against hunger.

To inspire community through poetry, TPA has established a series of assignments and virtual readings to demonstrate how poetry might be grounded in similar assumptions about the nature of human behavior and relationship. 

These assumptions begin with the belief that all people desire and deserve freedom from suffering, both for themselves and in their relationships with others. Freedom in this sense is a mutually-dependent and mutually-beneficial learned activity that aims at the reduction of suffering and the enjoyment of improved relationships with others.

Among the many arts of freedom (such as dance, music, and visual design), poetry explores the balancing act between material and meaning by employing a variety of language strategies, including shape, line, music, and comparison.

Therefore, for its part, TPA is interested in beautifully crafted poems that uniquely demonstrate how suffering is generated in our lives and how we might learn from one another to be free from suffering and its causes. These causes include ignorance, fear, and selfish desire. Its remedies include open-mindedness, calm, and community.

A second assumption of this project is also focused on human behavior and relationships. This is the belief that the human mind manifests in two ways: unconscious impulse and directed attention. 

Unconscious impulses manifest as thoughts or sensations and become habitual in unique ways in unique circumstances, but they can also be shared by our species as common impulses. For example, we may have a thought: a recurring individual memory that we find pleasant or unpleasant. But we also have a common unconscious human impulse: our breath moving unconsciously through the nose and lungs.

Directed attention is conscious mental effort in understanding and improving relationships, often described as mindfulness. Training in directed attention or mindfulness is available in the practice of meditation, a curriculum of the mind designed to improve its focus, stamina, and friendship with others.   

The mental energy of direct attention is a particular concern of TPA because this project also takes as one of its assumptions that we live in an increasingly information-saturated and dehumanizing world where we are constantly in competition for each other’s most precious resource: our mental attention.

In response, TPA is driven by the desire to draw, hold, sharpen, and reward its readers’ attention with practice in focus, stamina, and friendship. As such, poetry, like other forms of art, is also practice in guided mental effort or meditation.

In short, TPA invites poems that exhibit beautiful skill in shape, line, music, and comparison, as well as reward the reader's attention and relationship: honoring our shared interests in improving our attention and freedom to support the freedom of others. 

Examples of poems that both exhibit beauty and reward attention can be found in great variety on this site.

If you have any questions, concerns, or comments in response, please email TPA’s current editor and publisher.