Poetry is going through a significant shift. Of course, it always does: our art is made of the stuff of historic movements. So, our current social, political and environmental upheavals are affecting great change on our work. We know this. But I am keenly interested in observing this change in poetry, and listening to the voices of poets find the right rhythm, images and tone for their praises and elegies. This blog will be dedicated to this exploration.
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Near my home, a hilltop lookout faces eastward to a broad valley of chaparral and scrub oak. The yellow and green patchwork is broken by a long, thin reservoir and in the distance–Mount Diablo peak. The lookout is named Inspiration Point. How many Inspiration Points are there in the world? Perhaps every town has one. We all need a place of inspiration and a picturesque view of the horizon helps, though it is not necessary. The road crewman I watched this morning counting the dollars in his wallet was inspiring, though in a different, more tragic way.
Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, in a collection of essays titled The Witness of Poetry says:
The fate of poetry depends on whether such a work as Schiller’s and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human species. How did it happen that to be a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt? (14)
Milosz wrote this over twenty years ago, but it still seems just as true today. His argument for “a sense of open space” is what makes me most curious. He continues, lamenting, “Today I think that while the list of dreaded apocalyptic events may change, what is constant is a certain state of mind” (14). This pervasive state of mind is prescient today. In fact, poet Jorie Graham speaks of a similar anxiety about the open space of futurity in her most recent work. Graham’s new book of poetry, Sea Change, begins with a poem with the same title. Consider the following lines:
…a thought, or a vanity that comes upon one out of / nowhere & makes / one feel the mischief in faithfulness to an / idea. Everything unpreventable and excited like / mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future / takes shape / too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving / nothing in the way of / trails…(3)
Graham’s contemplation of impermanence and “everything unpreventable” echoes Milosz’s lack of “basic confidence.” We understand the environmental domino is teetering and may have been upended. This is important to humanity on so many levels. If I was a doctor or a psychologist I’d want to understand it in a different way. But, I am a poet. What does this mean for the fate of poetry? It’s not like poets will fold their hands nicely in their laps and wait for an apocalypse. As our new psychic horizons change, so do our Inspiration Points. What are you looking at? I’m curious. And, as for Milosz’ question, is another ‘Ode to Joy’ still possible?
