by Lawrence Ferlinghetti b
Lawrehttp://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_4/critical_urgencies/ferlinCan
Poetry Really Change the World?
What is
the use of poetry these days? Isn't it a romantic illusion to think that poetry
can really change anything? Isn't the poet really powerless in today's
dog-eat-cat world of power-players, power-plays, and super-powers?
Today in the United States, the poet has no real place or status. In Latin
America and in some European and Middle Eastern countries, poets are still
honored in society, but in North America what other
city except San Francisco appoints a poet laureate every year? Even so,
what power has he or she in the "real" world? Even in the last century, when
traditional values still held Western civilization together, a great poet like
Matthew Arnold could lament that a poet is nothing but "a beautiful ineffectual
angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." (He was thinking of
Shelley.)
Still there are those, including myself, who believe in
poets as the antennae of the race, as the conscience of society, or at least as
Jack Kerouac said, "the great rememberer redeeming life from darkness." The
greatest poets' greatest lines have entered mass consciousness, and they are
great precisely because they have continued to resonate in our lives today.
One thinks of "poems of first instance" (as the poet Mary Oliver
called them), those first experiences with poetry, usually encountered at an
early age, that somehow affected one's whole life. "In just the way that all
first experiences," Oliver says, "Making their way across the still-forming
landscapes of the mind, are likely to exist through an entire lifetime as the
most important, most emotive, most influential experience of their own kind--in
just this way, poems of the first instance are profound." ( Blue Pastures, p.94)
Walt Whitman was the poet that first turned her on. And then there
was William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Shelley and Wordsworth, Coleridge and
Milton. And there was Keats:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into
nothingness.....
And who's to say that so many lines of Shakespeare do not
still resonate in us today, having entered our daily speech, even though we're
no longer even aware of their origins? So with passages by Wordsworth or
Matthew Arnold or W.B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot or others more recent.
But to go back to our beginnings, did not Homer and the Greek dramatists
articulate the consciousness and the sensibility of the ancient Greeks, even as
Ulysses' voyages defined the limits of their world? And did not Dante in Italy,
Cervantes in Spain, and Chaucer in England almost simultaneously bring to
consciousness a new world emerging from the Dark Ages? And do not the first
lines of Dante's Divine Comedy still speak to us in the deepest part of our
lives?:
In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to
myself in a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost....
And so to 20th century authors like James Joyce whose hero, Stephen Dedalus, on
the last page of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" sets out "to forge in
the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience" of his race. Thus we arrive at
the point at which the poet not only articulates the consciousness of his time
but also becomes its conscience, and we come full circle to the poet's prophetic
or vatic role, with contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg (who so many have
attested changed their consciousness) and Bob Dylan (whose early songs were
great surrealist poems) and the Beatles. Who's to say they did not change and
enlarge the consciousness of millions of youth, which was then ingested
by consumer society to become a part of Middle American culture?
Thus we realize how the greatest poets not only change the way we see the world
but also cause us to question our perception and interpretation of everyday
reality. And we realize that the greatest poetry "subverts the dominant
paradigm" ultimately challenges the status quo of the world, and transforms it
into something new and strange.
Which leads me to the unavoidable
conclusion that the poet must perforce be an "enemy of the state." I hasten to
add, lest the FBI knock on my door in the morning, that I mean an enemy of the
state of our civilization today. Our omnivorous industrial civilization has
proved to be bad for earth and man, ecologically and medically speaking.
Disastrous, in fact. Couple this with the institution of stringent restrictions
on individual freedom to keep our imperialist military-industrial machine
functioning, and you have a natural enemy for the poet who is by definition a
free spirit, an untamed erotic spirit dedicated to truth and beauty.
What is
Poetry?
There are no
doubt as many definitions of poetry as there are poems. Perhaps more, since
there are more poetry professors and critics than there are poets. Perhaps
there's a need in the new century for some new definitions. Or perhaps the
golden oldies will hold up better than any. Risking the derision of postmodern
eggheads I'll put some of my old ones and some of my new ones to the test of
the 21st century:
Poetry is news from the frontiers of consciousness.
Poetry is what we would cry out upon awaking in a dark wood in the
middle of the journey of our life.
A poem is a mirror walking down a
street full of visual delight.
Poetry is the shook foil of the
imagination. It should shine out and half blind you.
Poetry is the sun
streaming down in the meshes of morning.
Poetry is white nights and
mouths of desire.
Poetry is made by dissolving halos in the ocean of
sound.
Poetry is the street talk of angels and devils.
Poetry is a sofa full of blind singers who have put aside their canes.
Poetry is the anarchy of the senses making sense.
Poetry is the voice
of the fourth person singular.
Poetry is all things born with wings
that sing.
A poem should arise to ecstasy, somewhere between speech
and song.
Poetry is a voice of dissent against the waste of words and
the mad plethora of print.
Poetry is what exists between the lines.
Poetry is made with the syllables of dreams.
Poetry is far,
far cries upon a beach at nightfall.
Poetry is a lighthouse moving its
megaphone over the sea.
Poetry is a picture of Ma in her Woolworth bra
looking out a window into a secret garden.
Poetry is an Arab carrying
colored rugs and birdcages through the streets of a great metropolis.
A poem can be made of common household ingredients. It fits on a single page yet
it can fill a world and fits in the pocket of a heart.
Poetry is
pillow-thought after intercourse.
The poet is a street singer who
rescues the alleycats of love.
Poetry is the distillation of
articulate animals calling to each other over a great gulf.
Poetry is
the dialogue of statues.
Poetry is the sound of summer in the rain
and of people laughing behind closed shutters down a narrow street.
Poetry is the incomparable lyric intelligence brought to bear upon fifty-seven
varieties of experience.
Poetry is a high house echoing with all the
voices that ever said anything crazy or wonderful.
Poetry is a
subversive raid upon the forgotten language of the collective unconscious.
Poetry is a real canary in a coal mine, and we know why the caged
bird sings.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight
imaginations.
Poetry is the voice within the voice of the turtle.
Poetry is the face behind the face of the race.
Poetry is
made of night thoughts. If it can tear itself away from illusion, it will not be
disowned before the dawn.
Poetry is made by evaporating the liquid
laughter of youth.
Poetry is a book of light at night.
Poetry is the final gestalt of the imagination.
Poetry should be
emotion recollected in emotion.
Words are living fossils. The poet
should piece the live beast together and make it sing.
A poet is only
as great as his ear. Too bad if it is tin.
The poet must be a
subversive barbarian at the city gates, constantly questioning reality and
reinventing it.
Let the poet be a singing animal turned pimp for an
anarchist king.
The poet mixes drinks out of the insane liquors of
the imagination and is perpetually surprised that no one staggers.
The poet should be a dark barker before the tents of existence.
Poetry is what can be heard at manholes echoing up Dante's fire escape.
Poetry is what moths hum as they circle the flame.
Poetry
is the thrill of a lighted window at night.
The poet must have
wide-angle vision, each look a worldglance, and the concrete is most poetic.
Poetry is not all heroin, horses, and Rimbaud. It is also the
whisper of elephants and the powerless prayers of airline passengers fastening
their seatbelts for the final descent.
Poetry is the real subject of
great prose.
Each poem should be a momentary madness, and the unreal
is realist.
Like a bowl of roses, a poem should
not have to be explained.
A poem is its own Coney Island of the mind,
its own circus of the soul, its own Far Rockaway of the heart.
Poetry
should still be an insurgent knock on the door of the unknown.
Why Is So Much Modern Poetry Really
Prose?
It's not news that a good
deal of contemporary poetry is actually a kind of prose masquerading in the
typography of poetry. Just check out any anthology of modern American verse
since the Second World War, and it will be obvious. It would seem that "the
voice that is great within us" (as one collection is called) sounds in us most
often today in a prose voice, although in poetic form. This is not to say it is
prosaic or has no depth or passion. It is often very well-written, lovely,
lively prose--prose that can stand without the crutches of punctuation, whose
syntax is so clear it can be written all over the page, in open forms and open
fields.
How did this curious state of affairs come about, and how
come no one ever mentions it? Perhaps because there has been a kind of
considerate silence between poets and friends, between poets and editors. No one
wants to commit the original sin of saying flat-out that someone's poetry is
prose in poetic typography. A poet's friends will never tell him, and the poet's
editors will seldom say it--the dumbest conspiracy of silence in the history of
letters.
However, it may be simply that, as sociologists have said,
America lost its innocence with the Second World War. And with it went a lot of
our lyricism, including rhyme and lilting meters. Or perhaps it began much
earlier. A hundred years or so ago when all the machines began to hum almost, as
it were, in unison, our speech certainly began to be affected by their absolute
staccato. City poetry especially began to echo it. Walt Whitman was a holdover,
singing the song of himself. And Carl Sandburg a holdover, singing his sagas.
And Vachel Lindsay, singing his chants. And Wallace Stevens with his harmonious
"fictive music" on the blue guitar. And Langston Hughes, echoing the hot beat of
Harlem. And Allen Ginsberg, chanting his mantras, singing William Blake.
Ezra Pound once decanted his opinion that only in times of decadence
does poetry separate itself from music. But his own Cantos can't possibly
be sung. And you would have a hard time singing T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of
J.Alfred Prufrock." Poetry was caught up in the linotype's hot slug and now in
the so cold type of the computer. No song among the typists, no song in our
concrete architecture, our concrete minimalist music. Like minimal art, modern
poetry minimalizes emotion in favor of understated irony and implied intensity.
And Joe Public stands back mystified.
But isn't this the perfect
poetry for technocratic man who seemingly has no use for the subjective in his
life--the subjective which is constantly under attack in our televised consumer
culture? And what of the rest of us who don't love technocracy and would rather
nurture the subjective in our consciousness?
Still, there is light on
the horizon. The times they are changing, and one would hope for a revival of
truly lyric verse, aspiring to poetic highs somewhere between speech and song.
And that doesn't mean they're going to rhyme moon with June. There are wild new
voices with a keen edge--lyric teen poetry slammers and jazz poets and rhyming
rappers at open mikes, especially Third World and indigenous poets, who are
breaking out of the cool. They have been returning to the original oral
tradition of poetry--the tradition which the poetry revolution of the 50s
revived, especially in San Francisco, with the emphasis on poetry as an
insurgent oral message. The printing press made the word so silent, but new
poets are returning to the roots when poetry was passed down from generation to
generation by word of mouth. And the mouth did sing.
The fly in the
wine is that a lot of rap and spoken-word poetry today makes it when it is
performed aloud, but doesn't make it on the printed page. There are of course
some big exceptions. Bob Dylan is a bard whose early songs are really long
surrealist poems that make it on the page, without guitar. Allen Ginsberg's late
poetry, on the other hand, suffered from the fact that he was a genius performer
who could read the phone book and make it sound like a great epic (See his last
"Blues") but it fell flat when printed.
Perhaps that doesn't really
matter, if the primary aim is to turn the audience on, to get it high, to
liberate it, to enlighten it, or inspire it, or revolutionize it. And nevermind
printing it or inscribing it in stone.
It is the bird singing that
makes us happy.
