There is No Territory: New Notes on Poetry

Posted on September 26, 2004 in Journals & Notebooks Poetry

The charge, the struggle of the poet is to retain the free right to express fascinations….Modern poems are a kind of rhythmic declamation, more than a song — few people realize that poetry did not rhyme until the Middle Ages. What was important was the choice of sounds and the images.

Modern poets struggle to orate, to see the world in a yellow stripe of prepared mustard on a fast-food counter or in the bright red pain of the clap — its subjects can be superficially ugly, but inside they must all be beautiful….Contemporary poetry takes up where the folk song soughed and faded in the late seventies…in the electronic rattling and buzzing of the television some modern poets find their words while others explicitly reject them, choosing to float beyond all that…it’s a value system that many do not get, a poet may sing of the twisted visions of fundamentalism, Christian or Islam, but refuse to make holy war in the sense of swords and sabers.

The poet strives to be independent of the thinking and the acting, of the prescriptions and the proscriptions, the illusions of order and the dogmas spattered [like blood across a cutting board]….Poets are by nature civil libertarians [who do not act] as mere vehicles for the State or Society as Grand Editor of Taste and Moral Values. To call a poet amoral is to misapprehend a place, to instill a false sense of opposites, the duplex rat cage of the short-sighted.

I, for one, wouldn’t attempt to map poets, to tack them to places on a chart. It’s been said that the map is not the territory. To appreciate poetry as a listener, a reader, and a writer, I believe, you have to understand that there is no territory….each poem is a ceremony and a consecration of words, a eucharist offered by the celebrant-speaker and taken in by the audience, to be chanted, recited, declaimed, or sung.