What is Poetry - In the 21st Century?"
I have problems with the desire to define poetry. It is equivalent to demanding an exact definition of the soul before we will admit of its reality. For many persons in the West this lack of material definition of a soul is sufficient reason not to live an examined life. Poetry's nature is not of this world and at some level mature people will have to accept this. We forget that we are the only species that chooses at times to arbitrarily reason exclusively with five senses. And then just as arbitrarily they descend again into mass charismatic emotion (Germany, 1932). A strong case can be made the five senses are a limited way to understand existence. Only moderns have the need to "understand" a concept before we can appreciate. What we really are looking for is a way to judge, and human judgment is frequently wrong, hysterical, or both.
I have a different view of poetry. Poetry must master the unaccountable in human life - and in such a way that we recognize its "truth" as if we were already family to our own strangeness. Poetry combines magic sound with the sudden appearance of the strange - as new insight to explain the "unaccountable" power that runs through life. Music, on the other hand, combines magic sounds with human mood to represent the "unaccountable". Both work at the magic level of human perception. The core competency of artists is to master the representation of the "unaccountable" in human life. Prose has a different competency. The honor of prose is its reliability. But even the casual student will see how expressive prose is the most easily dated of all writing - as anyone who reads a magazine or an advertisement from as late as 1920 can attest.
My message insists that poetry has no communion with prose. Any similarities between the uses of poetry and prose indicate a misuse of both. If they share common words on a page, it is only a technical accident. A prose sentence is the sum of its parts (i.e. the total sum of functional dictionary meanings added together). The honor of prose is reliability (within the idiom of chronology - useless to my purpose).
Poetry is an unaccounted for event. Poetry is constructed and presented as a song, not a report. Prose is always a list of successive ideas led by some chronology - or some misuse of chronology. Poetry seeks to be more than the sum of its parts; it has no dependence on chronology. Poetry seeks to become Monad - the representation of entire life (or life experience) in one symbol (phrase, line). Because poetry must always seek to be incantation or Monad - it must practice the unaccountable. John Dee, the English mathematician and wizard, spent his whole life looking for the magical Monad that would give him the secret key to unlock all knowledge and human mystery. It is no accident that it was at this time when high Renaissance math, magic, physics, and religion all seemed to share the same interrelated elements that the brightest thinkers sought Monad, not science, to solve the secrets of the human condition. I believe the Monad is to be discovered in perfect language - not perfect symbols. Incantation poetry serves as Monad, it represents meaning with different quantities and strengths; words without the baggage of words, sudden meaning without logic. And thus, Incantation poetry forever defines itself as separate and distinct from "poetry" in the form of newspaper prose.
By incantation, we mean speech stripped of all useless verbiage that does not contain the core communication of power in the idiom - and no dependence on normal logic protocols. I would also say this is the definition of lyric poetry. If we are not discussing the "unknown quantity" in literature, then we do not concern ourselves with poetry - or literature at all. We do not say that prose cannot discuss fundamental realities; we only say that poetry approaches human concerns with different powers and quantities. The honor of poetry is the sudden arrival of the strange. Poetry is identity found in the unaccounted.
When men first existed they had song and not speech to explain the unaccountable. To this day African and native Indian culture would rather sing a sermon, than be read a sermon. The hardest, most overlooked issue of modern poetry is whether or not we agree that poetry is still to be presented as song or as a prose narrative (report). No academic has ever come face to face with this most obvious quality of poetry. To resolve this question is to forever place the poetry "written as prose" forever back in the prose genre. So many bright poets have been crushed and marginalized since prose became the standard for poetry starting after World War II. It simply was wrong-headed. And the market has voted with their pocket books. Few people have noticed, but while the profession of "Writer" still exists on government forms, the profession of "Poet" does not officially exist as separate, life supporting profession.
My project recognizes that poetry shares with the monumental human achievements of math, music, god, writing, logic, etc., all have one common element: numbers (math). Poetry or verse (numbers) originally indicated an incantation with number or measure. Four hundred years ago our ancestors called poetry "numbers" (see Daniel above) and all poetry was presented with the architecture of song, with stanza, rhyme, and chorus, etc., that monumented its message with permanence. In our own day, Michael Riffaterre has used the term "monumentality" of poetry to emphasize that a poem, like a song, should be so "well built and rests upon so many intricate relationships that it is relatively impervious to change and deterioration of the linguistic code". I believe that all the best poetry with stasis in English is still understood exactly as the first "hearers" understood the poems. The poetry of Mantra Rain is built upon the substructure of unobtrusive measure.
So much as all poetry must find its presentation as song, poetry of the 21st century will never look like the traditional rhymed poetry of a prior epoch. This would be a mistake. As each language has internal strengths and quantities, so each age has internal dynamics necessary for clear presentation of song. Traditional stanza and rhyme are not the only way to create song in poetry. Measure and number must be represented in the structure - but only as an invisible element that does not draw a distracting attention.
It is the architecture of "song" by which poetry maintains its meaning impervious to most ordinary cultural changes. A human culture represents a society of men that have trained their minds together. A mind represents spiritual qualities - not physical. Thus all cultures have mental constructs - not physics. Poetry and song "memorializes" this living culture - permanently. That's why we still can make the claim that poetry represents a nation's greatest cultural achievement. It lasts as long as the language lasts. England is not a powerful nation, yet the memory of its poets makes it forever a cultural superpower.
Poetry as I view it should have no diminution of authority with age. The best sorts of poems of the 1930s (for example) are startlingly relevant and alive (Yeates' Byzantium poems are an example here). Rilke's poems after 1899 are unchangeable monuments to human search for metaphysical meaning. The honor of poetry is its monumentality to human wisdom and represents our, still, unaccountable, metaphysical condition with sudden clarity. I have said to my friends that "sudden and permanent clarity" itself can define art. In poetry, the magic symbol of words (Monad) must produce a striking emotion of sudden and permanent clarity. The human psyche works more efficiently with magic than with logic. Magic creates an instantaneous response - yet cannot be explained to everyone's satisfaction. It's not always repeatable, and that makes it suspicious to the five senses. Logic exists only in time. Poetry is tied to no chronology. Explain beauty or charisma in scientific terms and you only get blank stares. People will do anything for love, yet few people die for a logical proposition. Logic is honorable and respected, but used by the dishonest alike; magic is a necessity to those who are honest, since it cannot be produced without honesty. In the modern world this ancient influence of poetry in society has been lessened and little respected. The poetry of the last 50 years has failed. How do we explain the role of poetry in current American society?
On this website I have received many comments from poets who share the ideas presented in these pages. I think it is useful to share the voice of other poets, as with this mail from Elvira Davis in Australia:
"I cannot become involved with many modern poetry 'prose poems'. They have no rhyme or rhythm and when they are published in newspapers they leave me thinking: if this is poetry, I'm in the wrong business. They don't move me in any way. I like to be moved by poetry. By the way, very few of my poems have been published, a fact that I am now beginning to brag about". (2005)
Though I myself do not use rhyme (I use silent measure), her opinion validates the frustration of English speaking readers and poets around the world. Her opinion is also the opinion of the public who no longer buy poetry in bookshops - "they don't move me in any way". How long have critics and academics totally ignored this issue? Could it be that their careers are tied to writing poetry as prose? Could it be that they are not great poets, yet assume the costume of a poet to make tenure? I have heard of a professor that has easily published 12 slim poetry books - yet nobody bought or read them - and no man in the street will ever know his name. We can report that he did win tenure status at the university.
Above all else we protest the misuse of poetic language in the experimental years. The "singing" element of poetry does not need to have an artificially elevated voice to work as song. This is a common misconception among writers and academics. Common usage language can be charged with the most mysterious and powerful effects in the hands of master poets. There is no necessity or obligation to use rhetorical tricks, rhymes, or confused grammar to stand apart as powerful poems. Modern poetry is not poetry as we have learned to love it. I have observed first hand how other humans learn to love it. When they see it, they recognize it.
Since poetry is never the sum of its parts, we say it cannot be translated or abridged. Poetry seeks to become Monad. It's a once-for-all-time-event in the language, full stop. A Monad lessened by one part of its spell falls dead. I said before that the nature of an incantation is a phrase that has been stripped down to only its original power - yet is not a Haiku since this form, not proper to English strengths and quantities, does not have the internal stasis of song (self validating architecture and meaning). But modern "prose poetry" is not an incantation, and does not present itself as song with stasis or an internal structure. Modern poetry can be easily translated because it operates as prose and, like prose, has a word for word representation. Modern poetry, even so much as it hopes to be clever, still remains the sum of its parts. Prose in, prose out.
Poetry is an event; unaccounted for and strange. If a poem has not failed somewhere in its presentation, you will always remember where you were when you first encountered it. A line of poetry represents - in one moment of consciousness - many layers of ideation; never a predicted representation, but recognized when seen. Poetry will never reveal to you what it has just done to you. Poetry is a rabid bite, quickly leading down wormholes existing at the beginning of our creation. Poetry is never perfectly clear, but always necessary for clear living.
Next,
Humanistic Philosophy, Shaman Culture, and the Nature of Poetry