“Do not call me a poet. I’m a gentleman who is bored.” - Paul Valery???
I’ve “been” many things in my life but they have all really been just transitory moments, steps, stages. The one constant though has been that of language and thought swirling within me, sometimes coming out. That detritus, chaff, we at times call poetry. The person through which it travels, we call a poet.
So, I’m a poet. But I ask, is there a place for a poet in our world, anymore?
“We think and name in one world. We live and feel in another.” Marcel Proust
I’ve written a lot on this topic. Visit here or here if interested in those thoughts. But let me answer the above question and add to these thoughts.
Oh, I’m sure we’ll still have poets in our midst. Still buy poetry books, go to poetry readings. What I’m really asking is - do we still have room for the undomesticated poet? The poet who is natural, wild, and untamed by academia and society’s expectations. A poet free and at leisure to discover the extremes of language and thought?
I’m not sure, if this kind of poet is honored anymore. I’m not even sure this kind of poet will exist in the future. We’ve so well changed the ground from which this type of poet issues. This kind of poet (me), is disappearing like the farmer.
Philosophy is poetry idling
The farmer works the earthy soil. It is a long, hard slog. The poet works the inner, thoughtfull soil. It is a long hard slog. Both are disappearing. What we see as a farmer. What we see as a poet is a facsimile, a reproduction but not the real thing. Any more.
Why is the poet looked at so strangely - half-honored, half mocked - in our society? In the modern mind? From where comes this puzzling reaction of most when they hear me reply to “What do you do?” and I say, “I’m a poet.” ? “He is a poet???”, they whisper inside.
I think our suspicion, our half-respect of the poet comes from the fact that we see the poet as one who can go against the will, their own will. They are the last true remnant of freedom in this world (for there was a time when we were all totally free). Our curious blend of admiration, fear, incomprehension and suspicion of the poet is like that once given to kings - those for whom life, in life, everything is permitted, even that or especially that which they naturally would not seek.
“As for living, our servants can do that for us.” Anonymous surrealist poet.
I write all this because as a poet, I’ve always felt estranged by society, at its margins. Keeping my poetry hidden, a secret. Rightfully afraid of a culture that doesn’t accept the poet, except as a farce, charade, academic nuisance.
L’homme est double.” Nerval, Aurelia
Poets. Do we need them anymore? I mean “real” poets, not the Hallmark card hacks and MFL wannabees. Poets that let the world brew and stoke within them and then expel this naturally, fully into the world?
A poet: gardener of epitaphs - Octavio Paz
I argue we do need them (no surprise here - I’m a poet!). Poets are the caretakers of the unconscious - the sea of supra-reality that we , society, individuals ignore out of fear. We live scared and ignorant of the forces within us. The poet is a kind of savior, a witch, that regenerates life with the fertilizer he/she returns with from the depths of consciousness, the ends of language. It is for this job, this reason that we should need and honor our poets - like we would a bloodied liberator.
Here we should note how poets are so associated with “drunkenness”. The drunk poet. One drunk with poetry. The unconscious world is one without any ground, any form, a rationale. It is the world of the poet. A drunken world.
“Il y a longtemps que je pense que celui qui n’aurait que des idees claires serait assurement un sot.” Ximénès Doudan
Octavio Paz thinks of poetry as “the other shore”. He begins The Bow And The Lyre with the word;
Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation. Poetry reveals this world; it creates another.
I do think a poet saves himself through poetry and in doing so, saves this world. It is what I do, anyway.
A few last thoughts about poetry, the poet. And a poem to share.
Yet there is one who holds all this
Falling in his head, gently and without end
- Rilke“One ponders over a poem as one does over a human being.” Paul Eluard. Poetic Evidence
“I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?” - Octavio Paz.
It’s Up To You
I write poetry
like a goose might
take a shit.
So, what of it?
As the smiling cook at
the boy’s home said
as he took off the pot’s lid,
“Anyone can have a kid.
It’s simple, like making soup –
but it’s the stirring
that counts.”
I write poetry
like a sick man
walking down the street
might spit.
So, what of it?
Nothing real, I can do.
The real is up to you.
Thanks, appreciate you taking the time to say hello and comment. It'll come, if that's in the cards. Just don't push it or try. I'm a big believer in that. So much "forced" poetry out there ... I see it instantly, even when so called "acclaimed". Nurture the love of yourself and the wonder of the world you are embedded in ... that's the recipe to poetry.
Shit Lit !