demons and demagogues
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| This is often posted as a real vintage unattributed image, which is of course, part of its charm (but it's far too good a manipulation...sadly not mine..lol..) |
I've been stumbling across this article quite a few times today and bookmarked it to read this evening...not because I was especially interested in the religious tenor of its title or aims (though without the religious stuff, still a sound read on audience engagement with poems and not always having to fully understand things to appreciate them.) But also because it got me thinking again about what drives poets to speak when so much wants to silence them, which can range from insecurity and fear of rejection. Actual rejection and neglect of certain voices. Self-doubt and imposter syndrome. Just the general rigors of navigating everyday life in the face of artmaking and creativity. Capitalism and anti-intellectualism. In some places, persecution of voices, death, and imprisonment of going against someone with power.
Everything conspires against the poet, and yet the poet somehow endures. Poems still get made, though just as many do not. I think about my MFA years, and I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the best writing I encountered was by poets never wrote again. At least not for public consumption. They did far more sensible things with their careers or locked down their artmaking to private or both. The terrible ones also maybe stopped writing or maybe they got better or are still getting better somewhere in secret. Others went on to continue and publish in journals, in books, maybe win some awards. But these were often the most ambitious and tenacious ones when all other things were equal. Maybe the most stubborn, not especially most brilliant. (I group myself in this group.). It's hard to make a name, even if you managed to pass through the bottlenecks of publishers and award committees, and editors. It doesn't mean it's easier, and may in fact be more difficult and dispiriting because you can see the distant shore of things when you took their existence on faith as a younger poet.
Even outside that shore, the act of writing, even if you set fire to every poem you write and scatter its ashes is a gesture in madness. Of tenacity. My first thought when I saw the above article's headline was to snort and say out loud to the cats and no one in particular "Yeah, I don't think God has anything to do with that!" Becuase, in the Christian mythology hammered into my head equally by Milton and too many episodes of Supernatural, I know that the sort of questioning that happens in poetry, the sort of subversive luxuriating of language, is very ungodly and of the body vs. the soul. Or at least the way I do poetry. Maybe if I were a different kind of poet, I'd connect it to god, but sometimes writing and expression feels more like a demon. Not Satan or Lucifer per say, who is far too fleshed out and specific an allegorical figure, but something demonic harbored in the heart or the mind where the words get made. A hallucination. A trickery. Many people say poetry can get you closer to god, but I feel sometimes like it definitely has the opposite effect. Poets have the best kind of madness, literal and figurative. But then again, poetry is also about exaltation, which seems a little godly, though I would frame it more as a pagan sort of energy. Also, writing anything, and bringing something into being is a god-like activity whatever your brand of religion.poetry does nothing good for the world. Or maybe it does everything.
So we bed down with our demons and make poems from them, the big ones and the little ones, and hopefully they do not devour us before we are done.
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