. . . and on a somber note . . . (12.29.22)

I wasn't planning to write here again this year, but this essay on the death of poetry prompts me to one more posting. You may not agree with the author about the idea that poetry's not only dead, but it died 100 years ago, with the publication of "The Wasteland," but you ought at least to think about it.

Yes, many people still write poetry, and much of that poetry is so-called nature poetry, but the author's point isn't that we can still write a poem "about" nature; rather, it's that nature no longer fills our poems, because we are so disappeared from Nature ourselves (into science and technology - we know too much and our tools for knowing are too pervasive). Even the insatiable campers, hikers, environmentalists, naturalists, and backpackers among us are no longer "a part of" nature; even they are just tourists, spiritually and imaginatively speaking.

I wrote this poem some years ago:

Slowly We Move Toward Our Dreams

We think about our environs

because we aren't of them

or in that way environmental.

What wild thing, rat or bird or reptile,

knows it's in a corn field

when it is the corn field?

We move about in our thinking, slow to get

how much of it's a dream, how much us, our words

like a sea lying eternally between.

The thought occurred to me one day how utterly apart from nature I really am, as a modern human being. Sure, I can get outside, take a walk (without ear buds even), go camping in the Great Dismal Swamp, canoe down the Pee Dee River, sit on some prospect and take in the natural view. I can write about these experiences. I can even celebrate them. And sure, I can study Buddhism, Mysticism, become a shaman, believe in the Holy Ghost and the mysteries of creation. But none of this makes me a part of the natural world, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually. I am neither natural nor supernatural. I am Knowledge (i.e., scientific) and technological.

You cannot know the world and be of the world. "Of-ness" requires a lack of self-awareness. Knowing the world means knowing myself in the world, and by definition, separate from it.

Lest you think I am describing a tragedy here (as the author of the linked essay, a Millennial, seems to think this separateness is), let me say that the wonder of the world, it's great beauty and mystery, is exactly that knowing separation. At least, that's what it is for me. As I say in another poem that I wrote in the same manuscript that contains the above poem, "We make the world perfect with our intellect, / a perfect place to be, and have no home." Long live our homelessness.

T. S. Eliot didn't invent this rupture; it happened long before, with the invention of writing and the alphabet, and then accelerated through the development of print and print culture. When you reduce (or technologize) the spoken word to marks on paper, you have already crossed over from Nature into Knowledge. Eliot* merely sealed the deal in poetry for Modern Mankind. What began as pure sound - its nature, or natural state - became Self-Expression, via the technology of writing.

So, don't go read "The Hollow Men" or "The Wasteland" as documents in the Second Fall of Mankind, as the writer of this essay seems to encourage you to do. Instead, read them as great poems that finally express the world to us in our own language, an event that was itself at least 100 years overdue. For poetry didn't die 100 years ago, and, no, you're not writing in a dead art or a dead language. On the contrary, it was reborn, for us.

Which means, ignore the title of this post. There's no somber story here!

*To repeat, sealed the deal for Modern Man. The scribe who wrote down the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey, the scribe who first recorded the tale of Gilgamesh - these Writers were the first evidence of that separation. A writer like the author of the linked essay at the top of this post, a columnist for The Lamp, a Catholic literary magazine, would of course describe this splitting off as the cast-off from Eden.