I read these "poetry is dead" essays as one person or group of people's describing their own particular (not universal) journey through poetry, and combined with the fact that being a poet is not part of my identity that creates defensive reactions(many, many intense interests), I can read these things without being defensive by trying to draw a history which justifies what I myself decide to write, or otherwise trying to diminish or ridicule the author, and am happy trying to tease out the patterns in the person's thought as they compare to my own.
It is interesting to discuss perspectives on what poetry is, because it widens the possible conscious choices one can make while writing poetry, especially if a perspective goes against the grain of what one likes to do or habitually does. The contemplation of one's own craft apart from doing it is a basic mental action in numerous disciplines. It is the meta-perspective which guides the doing.
Each perspective is not something for me to fight against or ridicule, but is more like a tool. If Eliot is like the end of a line of poetry, could I myself write poems to show the progression that leads to Eliot's conclusion? What would that even mean? What is my personal stance towards modern industrial civilization, and what are the poetic tools that might express that stance in relation to previous tools of earlier eras? How would one even investigate the question? How would one attempt to begin?
When it comes to connectedness with nature and effects on cognition vis-a-vis the foundations of literacy, I like to post the following suggestive quote:
"I don't have to start with really intelligent or cultured people to make trackers. In fact it happens the other way around. There was a young student from Washington who was having terrible reading comprehension scores and was doing really badly in public school. I took him under my wing and mentored him in the art of tracking. It turned on aspects of his personality, of his brain, and of his mind, so that when he finally went back for his reading comprehension and the SATs he scored very very well, and there was no tutoring in reading, there was no academic training, there was only tracking. It's the most interdisciplinary inter-sensory demanding task that a human brain can experience, and it's also the most beautiful. It turns on the human computer in a way that nothing else can." [
https://www.newvillage.net/Journal/Issue3/3young2.html]
There is a hidden topic about nature, sensory awareness, the mind, and words, a topic which can be applied to the reading and writing of anything, but can be applied to poetry in particular. The topic goes all the way down to how words are first introduced in schools and how a person personally interprets words, goes all the way down to the differences between the mental patterns of a developing child in the country as contrasted with the differing mental patterns to a developing child in the town.
But, yeah, I will just leave it there, though there are numerous paths one can take from here and wind up back to ... what kind of poetry would someone with dampened sensory systems which are somewhat disconnected from their world, what kind of poetry would such a person write? Heck, how would such a person write generally? How would the disconnected mental patterns be displayed in words?
Hybrid Mode
