A Poet's Work
It's not what you think it is. Poets are the farmers of the mind. And they get paid similarly.
I don’t think anyone starts out to be a poet. At least nowadays, unless you want to be a two-bit MFL academic hack. Poetry is just something you pick up, something you tune into and which becomes a habit.
But being a poet requires a lot of reading. Nobody without a strong reading list of books under his or her literary belt will ever acquire the capacity of language to truly be a poet.
Of course, nowadays, anyone can write something down on paper or the inter-ether and exclaim like Georgie Porgie, knife in his eye - “Look, what a good poet am I!”. So there are contests and housewives and one-hit wonderous-eyed teens all labeled “poets”.
But poetry takes a lifetime, and even then, you are only halfway there. Death for the poet is truly the most important part of the profession. It’s great marketing. Earlier the better.
A poet is discerned by no more precise thing than his or her presence before their own mortality. Those distant from this “feeling”, cannot enter a work of art or give birth to any kind of work of art, any kind of poetry. A poet has a willingness to live dying, hanging from his or her neck. They are the most capable of all of us, of dying. In fact, to open a book and read a poem, or to think about experience in the way a poet does, entails faith in death’s coming whereas the majority of the common man, lives in the blissful ignorance of believing tomorrow will never come. Immortality, death, ah, none of my business.
And a poet’s work is also about having the leisure to think, to take in life, repose and reflect, and digest experience. But capitalism, our cut-throat, make money or else you are a loser world, doesn’t allow much time for that. Only those most stubborn and insistent souls, only those who really know how to give the middle finger to the press of culture - are truly able to do the poet’s work.
The trial of the poet is the circus of mankind. Life. A black humor fills the room and the poet has to laugh with the rest. But for him, the outcome is serious. He must cross that room of laughing idiots, all the while laughing himself, cross that room on a tightrope and emerging from its darkness, step into the light. Then, share a true laugh with none. All else is too real to be true, like the agony of flies.
I remember reading Rilke when a young man, not yet knowing I was a poet. Letters To A Young Poet. I read it both in French and English. I was good but too good. My crap detector was beeping loudly. And that’s another thing necessary to do the poet’s work - a good shyte detector. And no allegiances to anything, it’s all up for grabs and up in the air. He gives romantic diarrhea-like advice, like this …
“I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.”
Ugh … If you do want to read something worthwhile about poetry and poets - start with my friend Sam Hamill - A Poet’s Work. Or of course, learn to suck on Octavio Paz’s words in The Bow And The Lyre.
Now, having written poetry of all genres, all ilks - for over 40 years, I’m ready to start my career as a poet and call myself one. Truly embrace the poet’s shadow work and claim my mantle. So watch out.
Also, will be expecting a few free drinks and some understanding as to my poetic, “bent” ways.
“Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.” Jean Cocteau, On Invisibility.
My best advice to a young poet? Get on with it! In the time you took to come here and ask me that stupid question, I could have written 20 poems. Poems are made with words, not thoughts or all other kinds of abstractions. Go ask a poet.
I’ll leave you with this poem. (Found this one in the dozens of notebooks I’ve been going through. Some poems found therein will go into my next collection - The One’s That Got Away.
“The poetic embrace like the carnal
While it endures
Forbids all lapse into the miseries of the world.”
- Andre Breton, Nadja.
A Poet’s Work
I’m sitting on the toilet
wasting my life away
this morning like
all mornings|
when I see at my feet
a moaning ant
groaning in low decibels
for which only I the poet
can hear,
groaning, half-crushed
by my own rush
to sit and think
on this throne,
the ant’s antennae flicking
up and down
beating the unbeatable ground.
I look closer
to see its pain,
what remains.
But nothing I see
save its abdomen flat
and two eyes that can’t know,
necessity’s greed
or how I bleed shit -
the remains of another day.
I pick up my book that
is always there.
It’s called, “A Poet’s Work” and
I slap it down
upon the poor beast.
Bang!
to end my suffering
to end its mystery