The Fascination With Poetry

Is it possible that the things that happened in the past that I think of as being very negative events with very negative consequences were, in fact, the best things that could have happened because they culminated in this particular moment? But what would an otherwise set of circumstances look like? I can imagine some things going differently. More wealth. More fame. Fewer worries. Fewer headaches. Fewer betrayals. Fewer insults. But these imaginings do more to taunt me.

This is where art comes in. The art of my time, which was music. The music flourished for a decade before it was destroyed by Disco, mirror balls, cocaine, and rampant narcissism. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, with the dizzying blast of industrialism, art replaced religion. The artists – unless they became fabulously famous and wealthy - were not treated with much respect. Picasso would be an important exception. Van Gogh would be a more typical case: artists were volatile, violent, insane. It’s what made their art so great. Madness and eccentricity were key elements in the creative life. Art made for a very strange religion. It required sacrifice, yes. But those who devoted themselves to its power were nuts, highly unstable and tortured people impossible to be around. This gave the educated, unfulfilled bourgeoisie an alibi. It wasn’t long before technology replaced art as the premier force of its time. The new zeitgeist masked its obscene wealth with T-shirts and jeans and were happy to display an air of elitist superiority while trapping the rest of humanity in a web of digital addiction and hegemonic algorithms. The mythology of wealth so saturated the media with stories of wizardly entrepreneurship it blinded the public to the psychopathic reality of moguls preaching sustainability while their AI data centers guzzled electricity and water at unsustainable rates.

For years, the fascination with poetry was about the form of poetry - its scansion, its rhyme scheme, its aesthetic decorum - and how to free oneself from the constraints imposed by decades of stale, academic convention that barred its energy from a full, electrifying expression. The quest was an alchemical challenge, to find a way to release a fragment of true reality, a great and brilliant amalgam of potent actuality. The pioneers in the western sphere were mostly French. Les poètes maudits: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé. These were followed by another crop of names: Apollinaire, Cendrars, Eluard, Breton. Added to these were two Irishmen who had made Paris their home - Joyce and Beckett - and an American: Gertrude Stein. Stein invented a whole new approach to language. Also, she became a celebrity: no more poet maudit.

Once could argue that Joyce, too, unveiled a whole new way to create things – personal explorations, streams of consciousness, elixirs - with language. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are astonishing demonstrations of linguistic transport. So are Beckett’s novels and plays and Kafka’s fantasias of modern dystopias. I’m sure I’m leaving out a whole galaxy of innovators. Creative spirit was strong throughout the 20^th century, and it wasn’t so removed from society that it didn’t often make news. What has become of it now is so abysmal I’m not done processing it. People who continue to read books – not pixels on a screen – are rare. The end result is a large population of people who have so completely lost touch with themselves that if there’s a period of unavailability for ChatGPT people go nuts. They start clawing at the walls with their fingernails. It’s a mystery to me how anyone can so completely negate their own inner universe. It’s a form of consciousness as alien to me as what goes on in the mind of a banana slug. Slugs, at least, leave trails of glistening mucus, a mode of far greater integrity than going full Monty with AI. AI is not a God. AI is a tool. People have a habit of falling in love with tools. I had a crush on a hammer once. My hammer and I spent hours pounding on nails. We built birdhouses. We built patios and tables. I was going to propose marriage. Until it hit my thumb.

I don’t know why I write. It wasn’t that long ago I had a reason to write. But now that reason is gone. I write for myself and strangers, said Gertrude Stein. That was her raison d’être. Just writing. The joy of writing. If the joy is there, the writing will find an audience. But an audience, for her, was a peripheral issue. Gertrude enjoyed a good degree of financial security, so I’m sure that helped with her cavalier dismissal of earnestly trying to merchandise or tailor her product to a population of strangers. The important thing to appreciate is that she took great pleasure in writing. Isn’t there a word for the compulsion to do things that aren’t necessary, aren’t appreciated, and basically just an irritation to most people? I asked AI: what does AI have to say about an impulse to devote one's creative potential to making things people aren’t interested in? Here’s AI’s answer: nothing. AI has nothing to say about this. Someone did provide an answer on Quora: “AI says that creativity is the ability to answer questions about how and why.” When was the last time I wrote something because I wanted to know how and why about something, anything, lepidoptera, the history of the sombrero, the chemistry of cement, the compulsion to create things people don’t give a shit about? I would be far more apt to read about those things. Why would I frame my questions in a body of prose, or a series of poems? How is that creative? Isn’t that just curiosity? Curiosity is an element of creativity but it’s not, in and of itself, a core value of creativity. That desire to put things in words. Create things out of words. Why is that? Why do I do that? “Can the poem say the unsayable,” asked poet Philip Lamantia, “Isn’t this what poets have always aspired to? Seemingly failing but finally achieving a miracle in words.”

I don’t know. But here I am doing it. Writing. Pixelating myself with pixels. I’ve thought about doing a podcast. Is there a Joe Rogan in me screaming to get out? He asks questions. He asks about the how and the why. And he makes millions doing it. He gets lots of guests. Celebrities. Eccentrics. Stand-up comics. And they tell him the how and the why. Most of it is total bullshit. But that doesn’t bother his audience. It doesn’t seem to, anyway. Maybe a few get a little upset. Or a lot upset. I don’t want to do a podcast. It’s too theatrical. I can be theatrical. Believe me. I can be theatrical. But not on a steady basis expecting to get an income for it. Not that I get an income from writing. That sure as fuck is not happening. But hey. It was fun to write that.

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you. Song by Bob Dylan. This song is huge. Colossal. Big as the American prairie. From Fort Vermilion in Alberta, Canada to Laredo, Texas. What makes it big is in the tempo, the slow, measured, contemplative rhythm of weltschmerz, that Schopenhauerian acceptance of loss, suffering, and the limitations of human existence, all of it embedded in the grandeur of an expansive D major. It’s the tempo of old age, people who’ve traveled from childbirth to grade school to high school to college to pushing boundaries, exploring philosophies, pearl diving in Polynesia or searching origins on the Kalahari, all while managing a volatile temperament and making terrible mistakes and coming to terms with grim inevitabilities. And ending up in a hotel room in Oaxaca with a Martin in the corner a Bible on the bureau and a Glock in the drawer. And finally a table late at night on a patio with the stars out and a warm hand reaching across the table with liver spots and veins and a genuine warmth. And that declaration of reverent self-effacement: I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.