Gnats

Leafing through a book I came across in spare time, The Best Poems of 2010, I thought, is the problem simply that the world is now over-described? With the tens of thousands of poets swarming the pleroma like gnats on a warm winter day perhaps the word horde is simply exhausted. I don’t want to dislike things. I love reading poetry and I have catholic tastes to say the least. I can read euphonious noise. I can read private symbolism. I don’t mind a bit of photo realism. Minimalism doesn’t bother me. Rhyme and metre are wonderful. Free verse if fine. Really, I love all manner of poems. But as I flipped through the pages I didn’t find a single original line. I did not read all of the lines obviously. But I wanted to be able to finish just one poem out of fifty. Just one of that editor’s best poems of a year should have been readable. I know I write very little poetry. I don’t feel inspired. When I do I write. I absolutely will not do what I used to do routinely: write poetry every day. In those days I saw writing poetry every day as akin to a musician practicing or an artist sketching. From the practice I would get better, and the sketches would be studies for complete work. And that was fine. Maybe the muse is pissed off because I spend so much time reading philosophy and writing fiction. It is possible. My muse is definitely a Gravesian muse who has no patience for Aristotelian nonsense. When the mood does descend upon me my access to the language and the emotion of the imagination roars open. A poem or poems are born. But I don’t consider myself to be in the game. To be in the game means publishing, teaching, giving public readings, attending conferences. And behind those activities lies a commitment, a belief in poetry. I do believe in poetry but I am not committed to the art form anymore. I am afraid to say it, but I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit about the best poem written in this or any other year. I don’t give a shit who wins what award. I don’t give a shit about craft. I think the world inner and outer has been described to the nth degree and every possible theory has been tested. All variants of word order in the English language now lie unexposed in books, chapbooks, journals, perfect bound and hard bound books. We do have a million monkeys typing 24 hours a day 365 days a year. They have not reproduced the works of Shakespeare, no, but they have produced everything possible to produce. It’s not that there isn’t anything to say, it’s just that there are so many people saying all of it, with so few listening, it is a waste of time. There is nothing new to be learned in the world of poetry. People don’t die every day for lack of it. Like Daniel Day Lewis sort of said in There Will Be Blood, there are too many straws being stuck in the earth. Or too many people plucking at the live tradition in the air.