Originally Posted by Jim Ramsey
Hi Trevor,
I am going to just pop in with some thoughts and hope there's some relevance among my bullshit. I think I know what you are addressing as a theme in this piece. I've read many times that the beginning of agriculture was the beginning of the need to organize into communities, villages and towns. I've come across various versions of a corollary question encountered throughout my life, essentially, whether civilization is really worth all of its assorted pains and complications. Freud's most commercially successful and most generally read book addressed some of the concerns. He called the book, "Civilization and its Discontents." I've often read references to the idyllic, romanticized lives of nomadic peoples and Polynesian islanders who are free of the so-called evils of property laws and of being fortress-bound, of being crowded in diseased quarters, of being governed, of being bound to drudgery to avoid subsistence living. You don't speak of it in your poem, but animal husbandry is connected to agrarian beginnings too. Although animals can be more mobile than a field of wheat (can graze on wild grasses and provide milk and meat on the move), the renewable food sources provided by farming benefits livestock as well as humans. When people clear a patch of land, dig canals, build reservoirs and aqueducts, start putting up fences and walls, erect fortifications and develop new tools and vessels, the needs and ideas just start feeding on each other and before you know it, you have Cleveland and a work ethic. You also have museums, art galleries and produce stands.
Well, that's briefly my take on your theme. I can see the value in opining on the issues involved. The question is how to do it in a poem. That brings us to the problematic consideration of what poetry is or isn't. I read modern poems from current lit mags and see many that are just prose broken up with line breaks. Oh, sometimes the poet sticks in a weird metaphor or two to disguise it. Alternatively, I also see completely incomprehensible exercises of surrealistic pretense. It seems it's possible to get published either way, and maybe the biggest trick is to have an in with an editor. My general advice though is to write poetry passionately and not rationally whenever you can. And yes, the passion can be for language and not subject matter, and that gives poets a lot of room and opportunity to take on many subjects.
All the best,
Jim
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