– There is none so jealous of affection and devotion as the cohort, a human thing that lacks both mother and father, hence the unquenchable thirst for affection and devotion.
Poetry is the thread used to weave the tapestries that adorn our days, years, and eras. For such an important job, poetry is reenforced and whole swaths are continually rewoven, as the tapestry of civilization weaves itself.
If you’ll allow a new metaphor, until the bold Homer, the current of civilization flowed underground, as it will again through various dark ages. Before Homer or any other person emerged, mother earth spent one hundred fifty million years to arrange herself. Then we the people spent another hundred millennia just to invent language!
Sometimes and in some places, poets must go underground, as when officials and rule-mongers assume authority over poetry, then feather their nests via appointments and the bestowal of laurels on poets who acknowledge such authority.
indifference to truth
Today in the public marketplace, an indifference to truth allows for the election and appointment of scoundrels to important offices. Whether another dark age has dawned, or if this weird truthiness will pass, as all ill-bred fads pass, poets must reckon with it.
Poets must decide whether to be of service to the universal imagination, the metaphoric library where knowledge is kept, or to be in service to the rulers of temporal, politically-funded places and offices. Every office owes allegiance to patrons at all electoral levels, but their 2, 4, and 6-year life spans are scant time for ancient poetry even to re-place a comma. It is a bad fit.
America is rejection of monarchy, theocracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, communism, and whatever the French say is au currant but isn’t Liberty, isn’t government of, for, and by the people.
The American experiment is an experiment in republican governance, not in democracy, which both Hitler and Stalin found useful in deluding their subjects into thinking they had options, when they didn’t.
since Eisenhower’s first term…
As one who first pressed his ear to a railroad track and listened for an unseen engine during the first Eisenhower Administration, I implore you to listen to that still, quite voice within. Now, ask yourself whether poetry belongs in either the presidential, legislative, or judicial portfolio? Or does it belong in the hands of free, unencumbered poets?
If you agree that our power mongers and economy planners must release poetry into the wild, then we must restore the Office of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress to its Depression-era mandate, and dissolve the Office of Poet Laureate. That office is a vestige of authoritarian governance, as still practiced by our British sisters and brothers, but which is wholly out-of-place in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It pains me to remind you of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s most heinous sin against poetry, The Charge of the Light Brigade. With that composition, Tennyson writes in opposition to the people, poetry’s true constituency. Boil that poem down and political spin is all that remains.
Tennyson writes as if Crimea was an appropriate place for his king’s army to be in 1854, the same year these better lines were published in America, by Henry David Thoreau, citizen not lord:
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Hunger for personal liberty is the goal that carried to victory our ancestors, over their redcoated brothers who heard only commands. Their own hunger for personal liberty had already been swapped for membership in the king’s army. Those British soldiers in Crimea were the descendants of the men sent to restore order in the American colonies, where they also failed.
Tennyson makes appear heroic men who first abandon reason then ride down into the valley of death, on the mistaken orders of a petty aristocrat, who owed his own office to inheritance, not merit. We dishonor heroes when we deem every casualty a hero. Heroism is selfless communion with the human family; obedience to the king’s officer is something else, which may be why obedience carries a baton while heroism arrives open-handed.
Tennyson’s poem, instead of being held up as a model of patriotic fervor, better serves the purpose of all who wonder the difference between top-down and botton-up governance.
Once kings and presidents accept their places in poetry’s audience, with the universal imagination re-enrolled as sole beneficiary, then poetry can re-dedicate itself to the eternal struggle for peace.
High Crime, Misdemeanor?
Had I been a courtier in London,
while the House of Tudor yet reigned,
my head would’ve been the price paid –
For the lark of a poem that just shows
how like a splotch on Uncle Sam’s nose
is the royally warranted Tudor Rose.
