Poetry Has Left the Building for "Unreachable Solitudes"

The "primal warblings" of Emerson’s first-order Poetry fascinate me. As for poems, well, I can often take them or leave them. I don't mean that I take "good" poems and leave "bad" poems, although there's a lot of that too. No, I am more struck by Poetry --where it comes from, the nature of the impulse that renders a poem (when someone could just as easily weave a basket)-- than by Poetry’s visible constituents, the poems themselves.

Emerson’s quote is a startling one. I often wonder how many modern poets take it truly to heart. Perhaps they’ve repudiated it entirely. For Emerson appears to be removing some of the creative shine here, relegating poets to a sort of esoteric stenographers’ pool, albeit in the highest Platonic sense. The notion of "poet as water-carrier" runs counter to the modern sensibility with its predilection for personality cults. So many contemporary poets think themselves little progenitors. The idea that a poem (and its poet) is somehow subordinate to something that existed "before all time was" smacks of theism. Somewhere, a post-modern muse must be squirming.

Modern poetry readers are often conditioned to draw all poetic meaning from the poem itself. So they can be forgiven for concluding that the written body of work must define this thing called "Poetry", as though Poetry is its corpus. In fairness, this is not an outlandish notion: the universe of poetry consists of all existent poems. It’s just contrary to Emerson’s thinking as I read him.

Just as paleontologists cull marvelously extrapolative assumptions from a tiny universe of recovered bones, there is much more to Poetry than meets the written page. It’s no accident that so many poems circle the subject matter of bones, dead leaves, elegies, Fall, Winter, snow and death. Poems are Poetry’s fossilized record, or at least that part to which Poetry has deigned a poetic approach. A T-Rex could traverse the space between most poems and Poetry. Miswriting is the norm. Then on occasion, Poetry rises out of the peaty blackness like the Loch Ness Monster and poses for a snapshot. Just don’t make a habit of coaxing Poetry as it can sense a lakeside tripod from a mile away.

Similarly, if a poem says "I’m a poem" too overtly or with an exceeding self-concern, then there’s too much of the craftsman’s mallet and chisel in it. In this instance, the poem has succeeded in subduing Poetry. A poem that fails to point beyond itself is a poem that fails to avail itself of Poetry. At the risk of semantic demagoguery, I’m not opposed to allowing a failed poem to call itself a poem. I mean, why not and who cares? But if you’d rather call it a mullet, then that’s fine with me too.

In a Platonic sense, poems are, even at their best, murky approximations of Poetry. A specific poem's "poetic merit" could, in this context, be defined in terms of its proximity or "fealty" to Poetry. It’s often said that even the great poets leave behind a catalog most notable for its failures. From a lifetime of poetic endeavor, Yeats penned perhaps five near-perfect poems, Frost maybe four. While the precise tally is an endless source of MFA cocktail chatter, most would agree that the universe of "thoroughly successful" poems is miniscule. The Platonist would argue that the pantheon of perfectly rendered poems amounts to none at all.

I believe Emerson is suggesting that Poetry can exist quite nicely without poems or poets. But this may be too much for most poets to bear. Indeed as a group, poets may be the least equipped to render an unbiased opinion on Poetry given their vested career interests in poetry books, poetry workshops, poetry readathons, i.e. the benchmarks of tangible poetic production. I am reminded of Kafka’s admonition to the non-writing writer that the latter flirts with madness by not heeding the call of his craft. The salient point here is that a writer is a writer whether or not he takes up the pen. Poetry is even less beholden to pens than are poets.

In fact on a good day, Poetry barely tolerates most poems, resembling more a judicious celebrity autographing an endless line of outstretched playbills. The patience it must have weathering so many failed attempts! I’m convinced Poetry could, if it chose, create a great commotion even in a forest stripped of poets. Poetry would find a way! But if it had a fixed address, would Poetry maintain a subscription to The Paris Review? This would be a good question for Emerson.

Poets are not Prime Movers. What we call a good poet is someone with a knack for coaxing the already-there to the over-here. There is nothing "seminal" about a good poet. His or her ear is simply pressed closer to some wall. But the real action is always happening in the apartment next door. Occasionally, he takes notes of the eavesdropped conversation and passes them to the deaf guy on the futon who reads them with obvious interest. Most of us are the deaf guy. But there’s nothing wrong with our eyes and what we’d really love is a peek next door. Poems are a sketchy report of the Poetry that lives down the hall.

In fact, poets are no more essential to Poetry than radio receivers are to emanating radio waves. For those of you who love radio, this is probably a pointless observation since for you, radio is its programming content. Well, the radio wave says thank you for your intermittent patronage. But it's really not necessary. Now if you'll excuse the wave, it’s got a universe to cover.

I find myself reading more books about Poetry than I do poetry books. For some reason, this is a vaguely troubling admission. But like Emerson, I’m confident Poetry is "there" without it having to occasionally poke through in a poem. Every arrow requires a bulls-eye, if only to calibrate its imprecision. Without Poetry, a poem would lose all sense of direction.

I particularly love a well-done poem about Poetry. I think of two mirrors pointed at one another creating an infinity of reflections. When content is deployed to explore its own form, a bottomless abyss is created. Who's watching the watcher? Well, Poetry is of course. A poem about Poetry makes Poetry either perfectly self-conscious or perfectly invisible. Form can be made to dissolve into a formless totality or a form-obsessed preternaturalness.

It’s no coincidence that many poets suffer from manic-depressive or bipolar disorders. I suspect bipolarity –both for poems and people-- involves the ability to traverse two directions simultaneously. Good poems are always pointing at something else. Like an electron in quantum physics that does not "traverse" but instead simply appears in another place simultaneously, the best poems are forging interior journeys even as they journey outwards. Surely we are exploring some trick of time and space? Perhaps physics will one day subsume metaphysics entirely such that Poetry will be fully "explained." Should that day arrive, physicists promise to become as insufferable as many poets.

For the moment, there remains something fascinating about an inherently referential medium turned in upon itself, self-referencing the referential. I am reminded of the "unreachable solitudes" Rilke describes in one of his mirror sonnets. Just as a mirror is, at once, impenetrable glass and a medium for bottomless reflection, a good poem is immediately accessible and infinitely withheld.

I’ve learned not to share my Poetry theories with poets as they inevitably misread my intent. Then again, perhaps they read me with perfect clarity. I am not denigrating the vocation of poetry. But as with all vocations, an inevitable guild mentality can spring up to protect the craftsmen, often to the detriment of the craft. I believe poems, at their best, are magnificent failures, while bad poems do not even warrant the accolade of failure. The inherent poignancy of good poetry lies in the a priori hopelessness of the attempt. As Rilke concedes of mirrors: "no one who knows has ever described you…" Nor will they ever.

Even though its practitioners may chafe at this job description, no other vocation measures its success by the momentousness of its failures. In fact, it’s a good thing poets are not carpenters or else they would all have been fired ages ago. We need poets and their errant arrows to remind us of the "unreachable solitudes" of Poetry. Imagine rising every morning to inevitable failure. How many poets fully realize the Sysyphian task they have been allotted? Dear poet, think twice before lifting that pen!

Thus the nearest attempts at Poetry may be poems about Poetry. While this may sound claustrophobic, the walls are not really moving in, folks, but are instead dissolving in a vat of recursive stew! Nonetheless I find it very intriguing how some people absolutely detest Poetry poems. The intensity of their aversion is a certain clue. To me, they are like Wiley Coyote sawing the board off from the wrong end and plummeting into the ravine. The Road Runner is Poetry, maddeningly elusive, laughing at Acme Words and its many capture-contraptions, an asymptote with feathers. No one ever catches Poetry. But we must try. As Emerson might say, "beep beep."