A Look Back at an Early Essay on the Crisis in Contemporary Poetry
by James Albert Barr
The following essay was written by me 25 years ago in anticipation of the impending millennium that would bring us all into the 21st century, Y2K anxiety be damned (lol). I was a, still, learning, young writer and poet with two humble chapbooks of poetry under my proverbial belt: Scorched Ink (1995) and Owls on the Roof (1997). My third collection, Such Late Fugitives, would take me twenty years to compose and finally get published in 2020. The patience-challenging hard work that went into my most recent collection paid off, thankfully, because I'm quite proud of Such Late Fugitives, and believe it to be by far my best work to date. Its official composition began less than two weeks before I wrote a September 7th, 1999 journal entry that would eventually become my first post-education essay. In 2000, this essay would be included in an independently published anthology, through Burning Effigy Press, of Toronto, Ontario-based writers and poets titled, Voices Under the Guise of Darkness. Looking back at this essay, I must freely admit that, given what has transpired, not only in the poetry community, generally speaking, but in our culture and society, en masse, I did perhaps betray an ever-so-slight degree of naivety, here and there, despite my sobering conclusion expressed therein. I'd like to think my heart, and aspirations for poetry, were always in the right place, regardless. :-)
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There's a persisting dilemma afflicting the contemporary poet. It's called communication. That is, to effectively and undeniably reach the reader and/or listener successfully through one's written and, although not necessarily, recited works. How can the contemporary poet achieve laudable standards of creativity and originality, without compromise, and still move the hearts and minds of even the least familiar with poetry? The less than facile answer is to reconcile, to balance out the "comprehensive gauge" of language, while still conveying even the most profound aspects of life, of existence, using these rough, unrefined, contextual, manipulative "tools" we refer to as words. The great Structuralist linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, called them "signifiers".
Language, essentially, determines our world; how we engage it; how we interpret it; how we represent it, and perhaps most unsettlingly, however seemingly ineluctable it may be, how we believe it and operate it. These implications of the first magnitude face the conscious poet, trying valiantly to converge with people, while struggling within the rigidly divergent and corporately exploited language system pumping out "meaning and value" to a predominantly unwitting public of bewitched consumers.
Henry Miller once said in his indispensable book, The Time of the Assassins, that the poet has lost his/her audience - that being the masses. He said, "to be a poet was once the highest calling, today it is the most futile one." Miller asserted that in 1946! Today (1999) it seems more futile than ever to be a poet; a true poet who is still in tune with the world, however harsh and grim, and attempting to transmit the realities of existence, and life in general, to the "bewildered herd"!
Miller continues, "It is not so because the world is immune to the poet's beseeching, but because the poet himself no longer believes in his divine mission." First of all, at least in today's conveniently complex world, the estranged, average citizen appears to be quite immune to the unconventional poet's attempts to communicate. This is ignorance with impunity! The machine, the perverse economic system basically controlling society, rewards people, directly and indirectly, for their ignorance, and, in essence, dissuades the masses from poetry because they want them to remain passive, ineffectual, and most importantly, consumers! Commercial society depends on the neurosis, fear, guilt, inadequacy, self-alienation, etc, etc, of others, in order to flourish and expand seemingly endlessly! Poetry represents a distraction and even threat to the capitalistic protocol.
Now arriving at this daunting conclusion, you're goddamn right it's hard to sustain belief in the so-called "divine mission" of the poet! They - the populace - are immune to us, but we are not immune to them! Despite the improbability of ever getting through to them, I can't help but forge onward because I'm too aware of things! too conscious and conscientious to give up my "calling", however presumptuous and pretentious that may sound. I must persist, in spite of the apparent insurmountable state of society, because I feel so strongly, so ultra-sensitively!
Referring to the hapless poet, Miller claims, "He has been singing off key for a century or more; at least we can no longer tune in. The screech of the bomb [nowadays the television, computer, and other technological media - my aside] still makes sense to us, but the ravings of the poet seem like gibberish. And it is gibberish, if out of 2 billion [now over 7 billion!] people who make up the world, only a few thousand pretend to understand what the individual poet is saying. The cult of art reaches its end when it exists only for a precious handful of men and women. then it is no longer art but the cipher language of a secret society for the propagation of meaningless individuality."
Actually, poetry is a cult, at least in the parlance of our time. Much like the status of films such as: Blue Velvet, Henry and June, Gummo, Naked, Withnail and I, Pink Flamingos, etc, and their creators, films that did very little at the box-office, but developed a small cult following of admirers who appreciate originality, boldness, substance, and a total disregard for popular opinions and tastes, and who have subsequently supported the films that followed these because of the reputations of their makers, is tantamount to where poetry now stands in the much scrutinized and predominantly controlled cultural barometer. It merely has a cult following and an even smaller demographic of those who have genuine insight, appreciation and, at least, relative understanding. In Toronto, i consider myself a minority within a minority! I can't seem to reach the people in the so-called literary scene here, let alone the general public! It's a "shite state of affairs" to say the least! This very state of things running amok blind-folded is what I ache and mull over in my ceaselessly barraged mind. I cannot resolve the world because I suspect there is nothing to resolve! This, of course, sounds suspect in of itself! And unacceptable, despite objectively and logically realizing the inevitable realities to the contrary. And the crazy thing is quite a substantial number of people would agree in some form or other! We're on the same dial but different frequency!
All palatable, romantic leanings aside, regarding the virtues of poetry, I believe I do have a mission. I'm not sure I can, with a straight, honest face, refer to it exactly as "divine", but a genuine mission nonetheless. However, contrary to the romantic, subjective and ultimately naive enthusiasm and rhapsody of Henry Miller (whom I still consider a literary hero of mine), I choose to keep things in perspective when I survey poetry's place in the world; how its benevolent flame seems to be petering out and what I have to do in order to rekindle its neglected intentions, its yearning overtures in the name of humanity, the true organic, even mystical essence of life. This is my mission, my foolish goal, my seemingly impossible attempt. Onward...
