Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for July 22nd, 2008

Poetry That Matters the Most in a World Where Poetry Don’t Matter

Does poetry still matter? I’m thinking that, for most people, probably not. Most people don’t read poetry anymore, much less write it — although, I suspect, more people probably write it than actually read it these days.

I will even confess that my own poetry only matters to me while I am writing it. Once it’s down on paper and I’ve tinkered with it a bit, I simply do not care about it. It’s immediately alien to me. And, if given the choice between reading one of my own poems and a favorite poem by another poet, I’d much rather read another poet.

And if poetry — my own included, doesn’t really matter anymore, why not and can that change? Well, I suppose if there were more people interested in poetry (reading it, not necessarily writing it), that would be a start. As for why they aren’t interested anymore, I’d have to rely on the usual cliches as evidence: the literary elite writing for other literary elites, ever-expanding technologies and ever-shortening attention spans, the downward spiral in the literacy rates and our decaying public education system.

And, I’d also add that it’s becoming a rarity these days to read poetry written from a core of intellectual and emotional honesty. The writing of poetry has become an almost mechnical process for many poets. More and more, in the course of my day, I’m reading poetry that seems to have been written by a computer instead of on one. Poetry has become a means to some end for some poets rather than an end unto itself.

But poetry does still matter sometimes. When it’s not all about winning some award or grant. When it’s not written solely to be published (although being published is nice and all). When the writing of poetry is not one big circle jerk. When a poem is written because it must be written. Then, and only then, can poetry possibly matter.

Which is why, in that poetry discussion group I mentioned in a previous post, I chose to read a poem that matters to me, rather than one I had written. The poem is part of a book of poems I’d carry with me when I was undergoing chemotherapy last summer. The poem is entitled, “Spleen,” and is in Lawrence Raab’s 1972 collection, Mysteries of the Horizon:

I am like the king of a rainy country,
rich yet idle, older than any passage
of years, scorning advice, bored
with his dogs, with the sports, the games,
even the bright falcon falling on the lawn.
Nor will his eyes ever turn beyond the balcony
where, upon the smooth stones of the courtyard,
his people are dying. No foolish song,
no fond clown’s capering cheer him.
All the hard lines of waste he wears.
All the charmed beds grow damp and stale,
and his women, for whom every prince
seems beautiful, slipping from their clothes
in the softest of times, cannot
tease one smile from that thin face.
The scholar who makes his gold never found
charms to clear a body’s dark element.
Nor, at the end, will steaming Roman baths,
remembered by the mighty to their last days,
warm this dying king. In his veins
a brackish water crawls, and in his eyes
only what has been forgotten lives.

This poem brought me a great deal of comfort during those long, grueling hours of treatment and put into words something I, myself, felt but could not express. It’s interesting to note that the 2 other members of the group who most responded to this poem both lost their own mothers to cancer. I’m fairly certain, although I’ve never had a conversation with Lawrence Raab about it, that this poem probably isn’t about cancer. Yet, for those of us who’d been touched by the disease, we immediately saw our own lives in the poem’s dark imagery.

So poetry can still matter. I just wish it mattered more often and to more people.