[New-Poetry] Thought for the day after the elections

[TheOldMole]

Applause for Jim.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 10:55 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Thought for the day after the elections


  In a message dated 11/8/2006 9:59:12 PM Eastern Standard Time, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com writes:
      I'd go farther than that...To write a poem, in contermporary
      society, is a political act.
      Finnegan


    I disagree.  An aesthetic act, maybe, but not political.  "Political" comes from polis, the Greek word for the city (state).  It's a long jump to claim that any aesthetic act is also a political one, and, yes, I know "the only protest is beauty." I don't believe that the personal is political, as someone famously claimed.  Personal is personal, unless you're living under Stalin, where it becomes a crime against the state to be personal.  In this society there is no such crime.  We can make any kind of personal statement we wish to make; this forum is proof of that.  To imagine otherwise is to be paranoid and silly.  James, I don't wish to be unkind, but your statement is hyperbolically silly.  Can you provide one example--i. e. any poem--that supports what you've said?


  Sam,

  It's not one poem...it's that all poems support the my statement.

  A poem surely is, first, an aesthetic act. But if that was all it was

  poetry would backed into that small box of art for art's sake...

  instead of at large as art for sake of humankind.



  Of course, my stock & trade is the aphorism.

  And the aphorism is not an instrument of proof but of 

  provocation. But if the above statement was a thesis, 

  I'd say that the forces arrayed against poetry, the poet, 

  and poetic sensibility are many in this day and age.

  To name only a few: the modern workplace and marketplace, 

  the mass media culture, intense engagement with gadgetry,

  machine and devices, the fixations on celebrity and rabid

  sports fandom, the bombardment of visual and sonic stimula, 

  miked up preachers in stadia-sized mega-churches, pet fetishes, 

  cosmetic surgery and fitness crazes, global capitalism 

  and its making of cheap goods into our only gods,

  educational system deficiencies, environmental degradation,

  litter, waste products and overcomsumption, carelessness and

  lack of attention, overmedicaton and overmediation, 

  etc. These social forces are, in turn, supported by 

  our political policies in a symbiotic exchange of resources

  and control.

   

  The poet, though virtually ignored in contemporary

  society, writes a simple poem. He/she uses a very 

  rudimentary and commonplace instrument: the word. 

  He/she make use of very few resources in her/his art. 

  The poet doesn't wrap the Reichstag in Mylar. The poet 

  doesn't draw blueprints to erect the world's tallest building. 

  The poet doesn't spend million dollars on traveling road show,

  juggernaut of stacked amps, laser light show, and pyrotechnic 

  extravaganza. The poet writes, reads, and maybe publishes 

  in this or that corner of the planet and the web. 

   

  True, the poet, too, wants to be seen, wants audience,

  at least on the level of community. But the his/her poem 

  is saying something else. The poem is saying that there

  is place for the authentic, for attention and for emotions, 

  for close observation, for contemplation, for the comic and 

  the tragic without the trappings of showmanship. That there 

  is, still, a kind of speech that, by construct of sound and content,

  that calls out to the human spirit against the bewildering 

  blizzard of signal noise. It says listen. It says think. 

  It says slow down. It says stand up and dance. It says sit up 

  and pay notice to what is going on around you, really see it, 

  hear it. So in that way, the poem, any poem, is a political act.


  The Butterfly Effect

       In '72, Edward Lorenz gave a famous address, 
       "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil 
       set off a Tornado in Texas?" Sensitive dependence 
       on initial conditions: A principle of what came  
       to be known as chaos theory...
   
       But let's say it's only a figurative tornado
  that rips through an area northwest of Crawford, Texas,
  tear-asses across the 1600 acres of our President's ranch, 
  the 'Western White House', far from the real one 
  at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and maybe 
  that butterfly isn't even an exotic from faraway
  in the Amazon rainforests, ravaged as they are 
  at a rate of 10,000 square miles per year, disappearing 
  in Belgium-sized bites, maybe the butterfly is just a sulfur 
  or cabbage white, common to unmown fields 
  and suburban backyards.

       Perhaps it all starts in the back of a bookstore,
  before twenty or so people sitting on folding chairs,
  because the flap of that butterfly's wings 
  is nothing more than the pages of a poem, 
  turned in a young woman's hands at an open mike,
  as she speaks her mind, asks to be heard.




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