Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

While I’ve written before about identifying as a minor poet, my ambitions for my poems remain obscenely high. This is not to say that I have grandiose notions for what my work might cover or produce; I am content to remain a poet of cracks, niches, shards, and little white flowers that occasionally reveal teeth yet refuse to devour people any way but whole. What I mean is that I of course want my poems to be read by as many people as possible.

I say of course because if you believe in the value of your work, it only makes sense that you should actively put it out there. This is true even if the value you perceive is small: full daylight requires many wavicles. Why would you hide even the smallest fragment of sunlight?

The difference between ambition for oneself and ambition for one’s poems may seem slim. To me it is the difference between being driven to compromise for the sake of publicity, publication, or what have you and being unable to do so.

Still, I sign my work. Why? I don’t feel the need to prove the nature of my ambitions to anyone (why write about them then? because I think they are a decent set of ambitions and would like to see [if] other poets share them). More importantly, I want to take responsibility for my words, though I realize that other people have reasons for keeping their identities hidden and am sure that given the right set of circumstances I would do so as well.

Then again, maybe I’m just a madly ambitious egotist who isn’t very good at playing networking games and has created a theoretical position to give herself some sort of moral high ground.

But would I give it away if I were?

Then again, wouldn’t that be the perfect cover?

In theory, having a day set aside to focus on environmental issues isn’t a bad thing. I think I would have enjoyed its 1970 form. It often seems, however, that celebrating Earth Day is a bit like giving your assistant a bouquet on Secretary’s Day in lieu of a living wage and health insurance. Indeed, when you Google ”Earth Day sale” or “Earth day products”, it starts to look like deducting the cost of the flowers from your assistant’s paycheck. How much water did it take to make that T-shirt? Are you going to recycle that card when you’re finished displaying it on your refrigerator (which, incidentally, is set a bit colder than necessary and contains way too much meat)?

Where the analogy breaks down, however, is that as much as we talk about saving the Earth, environmentalism is really about saving ourselves. It’s about maintaining a habitable environment. Of course, as the work of the Goldman Environmental Prize winners highlights, it is the poor who suffer the worst consequences of environmental degradation first, which makes it even more difficult to convince the wealthy, who are responsible for most of the harmful consumption, to change their habits.

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It never hurts to have a reminder to let the people you love know that you love them. It never hurts to have a reminder to be kind, gentle, and appreciative of the people who are precious to us. Such reminders never hurt by themselves.

What does hurt is when a commercial culture gives us, instead of these simple reminders, ads for flowers and bears that suggest that men, if they don’t give enough, will be regarded as inferior and women, if they don’t get enough, should take it to mean that they are regarded as worthless. Then, instead of having a holiday that is a reminder to do what we ought to do every day, we have one that encourages female passivity, perpetuates the gold-digger stereotype, and stresses out the men who are supposed to buy all this shit (especially in a bad economy). It’s also heteronormative, and it holds up the couple as the only valid form of relationship. Did I miss anything?

So what, then, should we do about Valentine’s Day? Treat it as a reminder, acknowledge the problematic cultural constructs around it, but mostly, whatever relationship you are in (and if you are single then this means your non-romantic relationship or your relationship with yourself), use this day to be grateful for what’s good in it. Treat the other person, people, or yourself with love, whatever that means for you.

For my Scholastic across the Atlantic: tell me, do you recognize this place without clicking through?