Who has jurisdiction over poetry?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Oct. 17, 2024 – Poems are impotent to resist taxonomy by careerists who collect them, usually in graduate seminars, subject to the rules of the academy. Poets who follow their figurative progeny onto campus become twice-hobbled; they become like a caged bird – once prisoner of the sky, now also prisoner of the cage.
Robert Frost reminds us that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” What is a wall but the fragment of a cage? It makes no more sense to taxonomize, to classify, poems than it does to taxidermy, or autopsy, the poets who produce them.
Poems are love letters ever addressed “To whom it may concern,” or they are musical and memorable notes-to-self – clever to-do lists.
Schools are pools of carefully delimited thought. Schools are conservatories, repositories of what academicians deem worthy of taxonomy and of carrying into the future.
Schools are imaginary aqueducts designed to carry yesterday’s water of wisdom into tomorrow. What alchemy of hydrology can guarantee that the water doesn’t pool and thus become stagnant?
Every poem is written today by a living poet in conversation with the quick, not the dead. People carry poems through the ages, even if some poems travel aboard Wells Fargo or FedEx stage coaches, to be etched onto lintels of literary laboratories at Oxford and Ann Arbor.
Why take that risk? Let poetry run free as a river, as it means to. Or, are poets meant to stand still in silent obedience to whomever won yesterday’s poetry prize? How absurd.
But that is what schools do for a living! That is the essence of science, the very raison d’etre of the academy. That is the difference between science and art. Whereas the sensory arts of music, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, and drama all depend on physical science, poetry is not so limited. Poetry, unlike poets and other artists, pledges no allegience to the law of gravity; it occupies a domain both within and beyond the milky way.
Whatever magical sensations music and the physical arts produce all depend to one degree or another on how skillfully nature has been manipulated by a painter, musician, dancer, playwright, sculptor, or architect.
The ethereal essence of poems means that poets work outside the jurisdiction of the laws of nature.Subject only to the same laws of human nature as their sibling artists, nevertheless, rare is the poet who hasn’t broken most of them, while racking up demerit after demerit on the tally sheet of the muse.
*”The Oswego is formed by the junction of the Oneida and the Onondaga, both of which flow from lakes; and it pursues its way, through a gently undulating country, some eight or ten miles, until it reaches the margin of a sort of natural terrace, down which it tumbles some ten or fifteen feet, to another level, across which it glides with the silent, stealthy progress of deep water, until it throws its tribute into the broad receptacle of the Ontario.” James Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea. Cooper enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Oswego in 1808 for training in anticipation of the War of 1812. The house he lived in was on my paper route!