The Death of Poetry, Dead Poets, and The Best Sentence Ever Written
He ate and drank the precious Words
His Spirit grew robust
I love poetry. I read poetry. I write poetry. But every poet that I know is dead. The last one that mattered to me was Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997. Maybe it's me; I tend to be in the Early Majority, which means I'm slightly ahead of the curve. But maybe I haven't yet found a modern poet who I can relate to. Or maybe poetry needs to age like wine. Or maybe the modern poets were writing songs, movies, television, and books. No matter what, the halcyon age of poetry is a bygone era.
Poetry is dead. I think. Either that or you have to be dead to be a great poet.
If I asked you to name a U.S. Poet Laureate, could you? The last (and one of the only) laureates that I recognize is Robert Frost. That was 1958-59, way before I was born. Blake, Whitman, Dickenson, Sandburg, Cummings? That group, some of my favorites, begins in 1757 and ends in 1962. The fact that their works still resonate is remarkable. It is a testament to the poets themselves. But the modern poet is not exactly flourishing. The poetic voice of our time is nothing but an uncomfortable silence.
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs
Poetry can unexplain things quite well. Poets can hide their meaning or cloak their thoughts in metaphor and, by doing this, can reinvent an idea or sugarcoat truth. Why is this necessary? In the past things couldn't just be said outright for fear of persecution, repetition, or alienation, so poets could propagate thoughts in verse that sounded better than just saying what they mean.
This worked for a few reasons: 1. It sounded nice, 2. It circumvented cliche, 3. It provided the reader with a literary puzzle to unravel. The last reason may be why it takes time for the mainstream to pick up on great poetry. Like a verbal Rubik's Cube, readers needed time to get it. They needed to fiddle with it and come to their own conclusion. It doesn't do me any good to know that you can solve the puzzle; I need to solve it for myself in order to get any satisfaction. So it takes a while. As The Whitman Edict asks, "Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?"
Choice word and measured phrase above the reach
Of ordinary men
For my money, poetry needs to be simple. It cannot get to people if it is as dense and referential as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It must invite the reader and provide depth within simplicity. To provide depth within complexity is easy; within simplicity is hard. William Carlos Williams was a physician from New Jersey. He was a poet only as an afterthought. And if you appreciate simplicity, as I do, you'd enjoy his works. In this poem he wrote, in my opinion, the best sentence ever written:
so much dependsupon
the red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens.
I know it seems so vanilla, so amateurish. Why, then, is it the best sentence ever written? Because it is deceivingly complex. The following is nothing more than my interpretation. It may be wrong, but that is part of the beauty of poetry: everyone gets their own interpretation.
I'll start from the end. The white chickens represents animals, pure and true. They were here before us and will be here after us. Before that we have the rain water; it is the natural world that we live in. Try as we might, we cannot control it. It happens to us. For this reason the wheelbarrow is "beside" the chickens, but has been "glazed" by the rain water. And the wheelbarrow itself is a creation of man; a combination of very simple machines that has not changed since the day it was invented and yet remains useful. It is our way of controlling our destiny amid the rain and the chickens that we inherited. It is the salvation of the our race: human ingenuity. It has been able withstand the rain. So the opening line is now self-explanatory. We depend on our creations to further our existence.
One sentence with 16 words, 22 syllables, and anyone could understand it. Yet it can be taken as an all-encompassing metaphor for the world. He even shaped the stanzas like little wheelbarrows. Poetry. Time of death? Let's hope that it's just a coma. Don't pull the plug yet.
Poetry is not dead. Unfortunately some of it may be selfishly residing in the cerebral trappings of individuals minds. For some if swirls in their
head on a walk down the street, giving them great personal, momentary joy but is soon dismissed. This fast paced techno world distracts. No time to put pen to paper. No thought that someone else may enjoy the daydreams. Sad but nevertheless hopeful that it exists, and may one day be shared.
PC
Poetry's not dead. Sure, it doesn't sell very well, but that doesn't mean it's not vibrant with life. In a mainstream sense, poetry has essentially evolved into song lyrics. But great written verse can still be found. Much like the meaning behind their words, good poets often need to be discovered. I've found a few in local poetry circles, on the internet, at open mic nights and in parks. The best collections I've found recently have all been proofs hidden in a far basement corner of the Strand.
this reminds me of Hemingway's personal reminder when having difficulty writing.
"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."