Do I really care about poetry?
Someone asked me the other day if I “really cared about poetry.” I was surprised by the question because I take it absolutely for granted that I care about all things writing related by default . I replied by saying that in my experience poetry had taught me more about writing than any other form of literature. I immediately regretted this answer. I had implied that I only cared about poetry in theory. I had given the impression that poetry was merely a sharpening tool for more worthy literary pursuits. In other words, I didn’t really care about poetry.
I once read an article in a sticky copy of National Geographic that I picked up in a waiting room. It was about a new anthro-linguistic theory which argued that human language evolved from the singing and chanting of our proto-homo sapien ancestors. This idea seemed both beautiful and ass-backwards to me. I imagine singing and chanting to be marks of culture which I always had assumed would have arisen out the more basic utilitarian structures of language. But this theory implied the opposite: poetry (or at least the poetic consciousness) was not the far end product of culture–it was the basis of it.
Our linear thoughts and horizontal sentences, our persons of verb perpetually hailing and interpolating everyone and everything , may be the result of a sort of devolution from the edenic group humming and howling of the distant past. Indeed, the calling a writer might feel towards writing, the will-to-poetry itself, might be neural echoes of a language older than civilization and even our species. There could be, beneath us all, a vast ancestral ocean washing in and out over everything with all the sounds of and fury of an invisible Darwinian symphony. I would like to imagine such a force is secretly working through me the way it is working through everyone, but in writers in particular. The need to write may be born as a safety valve for the tidal shore lines of our ancestors, not unlike the metaphorical lines Camille Dungy spoke of.
However, I don’t think it can ever be truly within our nature to unlock the true nature of our liquid logos all-natural supercomputer monkey brains. The old ape songs of eons past have now been reduced to primal reflexes tapping and flicking bits of information at each other through thin air. For me, the line is a bust-form of ADD: a slight tear in the commodified attention deficit that is repeated to me ad nauseum via advertisements and information overload. For me, the line is a form of pop cultural garbage origami in which I fold my perceptions along the endless manifolds of civilized nonsense in the hopes of creating something beautiful–even if temporal.
