A Bag Full of
Slimy Questions
(If I started to
read poetry
To a group of
working men
On the street
On their lunch
hour
And they started
to throw
Bottles and cans
at me
It would not be
because
My words were too
lofty
And they took
offence
At my language
It would be
Because they are
annoyed
That someone is
interrupting
Their lunch hour
By
reading poetry.
What sort of
fruitcake
Walks up to a
group
Of men on their
lunch hour
And starts
reading poetry?)
- - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - -
The question arises
Like Aphrodite
rising from the sea
At the moment of
her birth
Fully formed and
imbued
With all her
provocative powers:
What purpose do
we intend for our poetry?
Let me further
stir
The metaphorical
pot
With a little
warning:
The question is
more treacherous than any Hydra,
For it will grow
A half dozen new
interrogative heads
Before the first
has even found
Anything
resembling a satisfactory answer.
What do we
believe the purpose of our poetry to be?
Is it to serve as
a kind of “functional art”? That is to say must it point to something else;
illuminate some principle; expound some hitherto shrouded veracity? Is it the
role of poetry to serve as footstool to political agendas and social
unrest? Is it poetry’s job to carry the
story of our broken hearts and broken bodies?
Is poetry a container, granted, perhaps an amorphous one, into which we
pour all our wounds, all our healing, our sighing our crying and our dying.
If we were poems
And who says we
are not
Would we be charged
By our authors
To forever point
Away from
ourselves
And to something
That we have been
Written about?
Or is poetry an
“aesthetic art”? Is the poet’s art valid when, like so many other art forms, it
exits first and foremost to please the senses: to add beauty to the world with
its sound and its rhythm or even with its appearance on the page? Perhaps this is what poetry is about: to
enrich the soul with the sheer beauty of words and anything else it may
accomplish that is not about the beauty of language is a purely latent, albeit
perhaps beneficial effect. Perhaps the
power of poetry is not that the words themselves laid out just so clearly or in
just the “proper” way may persuade, but rather that beauty has the property of
expanding the mind and enlivening the soul, and it is those broadened hearts
and lively souls that seek to change the world and engender equity and live in
peace.
So which is it?
Is poetry a vehicle for our politics, our histories, our sunsets, our
butterflies, our lost lives and loves?
Or are these things a vehicle for our poetry?
The answer of
course is yes.
If we decide that
the first path is our personal road less taken wanting wear, in pursuing the
path do we risk making poetry a second class art, subject and beholden to that
which is not art. If it is the second
way that calls us and we decide that indeed, the poem is the thing, we risk the
ugly epithet of irrelevance.
I fear my pot of
metaphors
Is growing cold
And my word-stew
Is congealing
terribly
So again I’ll
stir the pot
Like Raven
Of
I create by
playing tricks
Even though
Most of my tricks
Explode in my
face
So this is my
trick tonight
To hurl a bag
full
Of squirming
slimy questions
For which I
myself have no immediate answer
Over your
fortress wall
And wait
crouching outside the barred gate
And listen and
watch
For whatever may
happen.
I have not and I
may never take sides on this issue. I am
so very grateful no one can make me take sides.
Oh there are times I am painfully, wretchedly stubborn like Maximillian Arrowsmith, I will
not be dissuaded from the purity of my purpose… it MUST be about art. And all it takes are the eyes of a hungry
child to transform me in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye into a crusader,
a literary Robin Hood.
Tell me your thoughts,
For I want to
learn.
Em’el
22. August, 2003
