Tonight I almost re-registered for the Eratosphere Poetry Forums.  I don’t know how almost that almost is, given the fact that the site makes my skin crawl.  I did click through the registration process until I reached the last stage where I’d enter my name and other info before hitting send.  I closed that tab on my browser before completing the process.

Sometimes I think I’d like to get back into poetry criticism, at least as a diversion from other things; most other times, I remember the very closed-circuit approach many poets take:  to them, poetry is everything.  The bit from Emerson’s essay on poetry, which describes the whole world as a source for poetry and real Poets (capital-P) as capable of finding their material in any thing and everything, is noted, a point well-taken.  However, I see the same old names, the same old arguments, the same gross myopia at the Eratosphere fora whenever I visit that site.  These people (whoever) spend an extraordinary amount of their time living entirely in the abstract.  They don’t address a poem, much less the world being referenced by that poem, when they discuss poetry; no, no, they address poetics and theories of criticism and ideals of poetry.  It makes my stomach churn.

Don’t they know that the world itself precedes poetry, makes poetry important, rather than the other way around?

I would be the last person to claim that good poetry is not being written.  Perhaps great poetry continues to be written.  But not there.

In an alternative thought-stream (if that is what these are), I wonder if poetry can continue to exist in the world.  The world itself seems to be developing a reality that is more mystifying, awe-inspiring, significant, and full of engrossing symbols, than any mere set of words can express linearly (in lines; poetic lines.)  I know such a thought is heresy.  I do not believe it myself.  Instead, I would believe that poets don’t exist and may no longer exist — not poetry.

People do not want poetry; they want life.  Could a poet address the actual world in which we live, and give some hint of how to live within it, then true poetry would again fill the heads of the greatest potential audience.  Instead the poets are dead either in looking entirely inwardly — in which case poetry can matter only to the poet — or by trying to regurgitate the old dreams, the old world, the usual suspects and manners of connection.  We will hear once more about unrequited love, no doubt, but no hint about the current environment which suggests:  the singularity that quickly approaches (should such be true and honest); the end of nation-states (should that reality come to be); or the next evolutionary step in human civilization(s).  I have yet to read a poem that accurately dissected and made digestible the relationship of a human to a computer, and of a human society to the Internet, for instance.

Perhaps some such poem exists; but it is not being written at Eratosphere, of that you can be sure.

Ok, well, this post seems destined to turn into a rant, and I’m just slip-streaming along.  Time to close it.