A Poetics # 100: Matter

The Symbol of Poetry: An Empty Entryway to the Ruins of a Hotel atop Lookout Mountain (7 July 2013)


The question is why poetry can’t matter. Why can it not matter?
Today, riding home, I heard, on the radio, words introducing someone. Her name bounced off me (as if names matter). I missed the place she was from (a likely insignificant place based merely on where her current professorship now traps her). I heard that she was a poet, that she was a poet’s poet, that every poet knows who she is (I had never heard of her before), that she was reviewing (I, with my poet’s ear and heartbreak, wrote “worried” here first, mishearing the word formed in my own head) the work of another poet.
She said a few words about the poet and about the poems in the poet’s book. I could not even concentrate on what she was saying—her voice was so earnest. She spoke as if she were filled with belief in what she was saying. And I am no believer, just a questioner, just a screamer into the night, just a voice building darkness. I am not driven by earnestness. I am not driven by belief, which is a fool’s method.
If you say, “Now,” I say, “When?” If you say, “How,” I say, “Hew.” Answers are words against the possibility of belief.
I began, slowly, but agitated, to speak to her voice spilling over me in the shape of the slime and slurry of putrescent belief. I began to speak against her voice, just her voice. I could not listen to what she said. Her voice pleaded for listening, but the sound of it repelled me. She was a famous poet, so she knew how to sound like a poet.
She sounded like a tinny death rattle up out of the throat, but given over in some ungathered and ragged rhythm. She sounded serious but in the slightest of ways. Her voice told me, “Give up poetry, you the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, you the people of Haddad and Hoboken! Give up on poetry because it will drain the life out of you. It will take your will to live and replace it with a sclerotic and arrhythmic drum machine. You need no heart anyhow. This place, this wretched earth is too dark, and darkening, for you to want to live in it, and poetry we have made it so you will understand that it is too unimportant for you to think about.
“Have a burger. It’s better for you. Or maybe a few pink-slime chicken fingers.” (And you thought chickens had toes.)
I almost calmed down as she nattered out of her body her perfectly perfect prose, her little sentences of no particular delight. But then she quoted a part of a poem, or an entire poem—I don’t know. I recall only that it continued for a while. And I almost yelled at the radio as Dave turned off the Thruway at Exit 25 heading west.
Dave said, “That doesn’t even sound like poetry.” I replied, “That’s because she’s reading over the linebreaks.”
I then raised my voice against the radio, which always brings me poetry to melt the fat front my body, to burn the skin from my limbs: “Read the linebreaks! Read the linebreaks! Why are there even linebreaks there, if you don’t read them!?”
The poem itself, even with its linebreaks intact in the form of glancing pauses, seemed terrible to me, but (again) I don’t know. I couldn’t concentrate on the poem. I’m not sure of the words. Because she read the poem in that careful poet’s cadence.
Say that phrase quietly and slowly (“careful poet’s cadence”), pronounce all six of its syllables softly, and you will be able to approximate this vocal characteristic. In this kind of poetry, the poet lives in a dream state (yet opiumless), and the poem is pulled out of the body searching for rhythm and meaning, because none can ever survive for long within that dead and dried thing called the poem.
Again I raised my voice at the radio, telling it that it had helped prove people why poetry is nothing, or less that nothing, a vacuum at the edge of nothing that sucks nothing away. I sat there, aggrieved, wondering how poetry could survive and suddenly understanding why it could not. Why our world makes a poetry that demands inattention!!!!
(Note the force of those exclamation marks demanding lack of attention!!!!)
And I’m not even complaining, ladies and gentlemen, about the Zimbabwean protest poetry that the morning commute east had earlier brought into my ears. Oh, I love the idea that the poets cared, that they thought they could make a difference in the world, but their words, spun out of early 1960s beat writing and full of clumsy whitticisms (note the epenthetic h) were destined to be as useless upon the face of the earth as they were painful to my ears.
I could not have been filled more quickly with sudden insight this afternoon about the hollowness of poetry had I driven through Eureka, California:
Poetry isn’t communal; it doesn’t bring people together to attend to the same sounds, to listen to words. Poetry is made for poets, who usually care less about poetry than those who hate it, because only poets try to kill poetry.
Poetry isn’t a skill; it’s a feeling. Poets do not take their craft seriously; they don’t believe in craft. They believe they can learn poetry on the run, that repetition builds the poetic muscle. They believe they learn how to write poems by reading them, rather than studying them, by paying attention to their wholes instead of their component parts. Poets try not to be mechanics, because they fear that if they understand poetry they will then be able to create poems.
Poetry is read aloud by zombies, their lives already taken from them by the virus, the poem, the deadliest strain running through contemporary life, producing poems of bombast without blast, love without loveliness, hate without hatred. Poems come in two colors: grey and beige (ecru having been killed off a few years back).
Poetry has nothing to say without understanding that poetry should have nothing to say. The poetry of protest is the poetry of the political without being the poetry of any matter at all. Even if your poetry leads directly to your death, you probably had nothing to say that mattered to anyone. Poets have lost the idea that the poem has to surprise the reader linguistically, to change the reader’s perspective, to put one in a state of delicious unbalance.
Poetry says too much, trying to copy the rest of the obvious world. It does not want a reader to be lost. And if the poem doesn’t tell well enough the simple hollow story of its self, then the poem will preface the “live” reading of the poem with a full explanation of how the poem is about a little-known Courlandian fable the poet had heard of once on a visit to Latvia but did not recall until a moment five years later at a bar in Brooklyn as a woman he’d never seen before (but eventually to become his wife) had walked into the bar, just before he reads that poem, which explains that it is poem about a little-known Courlandian fable the poet had heard of once on a visit to Latvia but did not recall until a moment five years later at a bar in Brooklyn as a woman he’d never seen before (but eventually to become his wife) had walked into the bar.
Poetry doesn’t care about the audience. Poetry hates the audience for not being made up completely of poets, even when it usually is nothing poets. Poetry is made by those in love with the sound of their words, but not in love with the sound of words.
Poetry cares too much about its audience. Poetry is a golden Labrador retriever, all tongue and tail-swishing and excitement, all eager to please, but with nothing to offer. Poetry is legerdemain, legerdecoeur, legerdemot; it is a magic trick that everyone can see failing—a rabbit picked up off the floor, the lady literally sawn in half, and screaming and trapped in that wooden casket now sodden with her own blood, her arms flailing but her legs moving only slightly whenever the entire box moves.
Poetry hates itself. It knows it is worthless. It knows it should die. It knows no-one loves it. It knows no-one will cry when it dies. It knows it will be cremated after death and sprinkled over the gently rocking waves of a toilet just refilled after flushing.
Poetry is clean, clean enough so you can eat off it. Poetry tries hard to avoid disturbing the reader into new thoughts, new ways of seeing, new ways of being. Poetry wants you to know what you know is what to know. It is a good friend, fat hand patting your back. You thank Poetry until that slender sharp blade slices through the skin, the flesh, and the bone of your back.
Poetry knows it can do nothing, nothing, nothing. Poetry knows it does no-one any good. Poetry knows it sucks the soul from the living.
Poetry is our resplendent, ravishing, radiant zombie goddess.
ecr. l'inf.