In our media-drenched, entertainment-oriented age poetry's performance role is an apparent natural. Rap artists may be the global village 's electronic bards. Highly emotional competitive readings ( "Slams") are extremely popular. But this is not necessarily a good thing.
Poetry Readings-or Privately Reading?
When asked by the New York Times (October 23, 1989) to comment on the growing popularity of poetry readings, John Updike remarked that people “are becoming more and more illiterate and are reverting to an oral culture… [for some people] it is easier to go to a reading than read a book”.
Plato, in the dialogue Ion, questioned whether poetry’s oral culture is compatible with an interest in knowledge, even suggesting that it fosters a kind of illiteracy, and disinterest in core meanings.
Ion is a poetry reader of considerable fame, specializing in Homer. Yet Ion has what we call today an "attention span problem” or “learning disability” linked to his poetry skills. Ion complains: “When someone speaks about any other poet [besides Homer], I can’t attend. I can’t put in one single remark to the point, I just doze….”
Ion mechanically recites Homeric verse’s allusions to the arts of war and horsemanship without really understanding these subjects. Therefore when another poet is quoted on the same subject matter, Ion loses interest and nods off.
The performances, the techniques, the methods, are everything while content is at best of minimal interest. Unable to learn a subject matter, Ion cannot teach. He can only make audiences cry or laugh. Like a salesman on commission, Ion is paid only if he “gets results”. He is an early version of a “performance poet.”
Poetry’s Higher Autism
Hence what should poetry’s role be in our outer-directed age with its emphasis on visual images and the spoken word? Should the poet be an entertainer or thinker?
Poetry should both show and say. John Stuart Mill, who had a much more positive view of poetry than Plato, drew the distinction between eloquence and poetry. The former “supposed an audience.” Poetry, in contrast, “must be heard.”
But the audience merely “overhears” the poet’s meditations as if, though silent, they were being accidentally eavesdropped upon. This is accomplished by reading the poet’s words, not simply attending readings full of verbal fireworks.
Rainer Maria Rilke gives eloquent testimony to the poet’s inner life. He urges the aspiring young poet to turn inward, and write from the depths of solitude. Rilke called this inward turning a return to the “treasure house” of childhood memories.
This is poetry’s “Higher Autism.” Rilke rejects a market-driven poetry, even counseling this wannabe poet against trying “to interest magazine in your poems," because poetry rises by “necessity” and is the poet’s “fond natural possession.”
Poetry: the Child and Adult Merged
But reaffirmation of this meditative poetic innocence does not mean contempt for ideas. Mill asserted: “[A] poet may always, by culture, make himself a philosopher”. Critic R.P. Blackmur observed that poetry --he was talking about Marianne Moore’s verse-- is “sustained by reason.” The voice of reason guides the impulsive child without suppressing the spirit.
The emotional child of poetry is co-equal with the philosophic adult: ideas are infused with emotion, logic, and passion. But most vitally this is not poetry as an exercise in childish self-absorption.
The primary focus of real poetry does not lie in its consciousness of egotistical excess, but in meditations on the external world as filtered through the poet’s evocative self.
Poetry bodies forth an unseen world of joy, thought, sadness and spiritual depth: it names the absent and envisions the invisible. In its most profound sense poetry, as George Santayana observed, turns its passionate imagination toward the order of things, and for that moment becomes philosophical.
Thomas White - Thomas White’s poetry, essays, and fiction have been widely published in both online and print journals in Canada, United States, ...
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