Poetry in the English speaking world is now part of the academic
humanities, and the publication of poems, like the publications of
academic humanists, do not have as their primary purpose the
communication of knowledge: they instead primarily serve a
credentialling function. A real poet is one who gets published, and
there is among publication venues a very clear hierarchy of prestige
determining exactly how real the poets who are accepted into those
venues are. Although many people will deny that they believe this
is true -- "why I can name a lot of excellent poets who never
published anywhere important" -- the fact remains that everyone acts
as if it were true. If you ask ten poets whether they would be
vastly more excited to have an interest shown in their work by a
poet who had been published twice by Bloodaxe than by one who had
been published twice by The Tunbridge Wells Welcomer, nine would
admit to preferring the former, and the tenth would lie.
In other words the publication of poetry is, like everything else
to which our society assigns any value, a matter of power -- a
minor and marginal power in terms of society in general, but
power nevertheless. The hierarchy of prestige in literary
publication is supported by a hierarchy of people who have a power
to validate poetry in direct proportion to the prestige of the
publication venues whose gates they guard. The results of depending
on this method for the dissemination of poetry on the quality of the
verse of our age speak for themselves.
We make take some encouragement in this gloomy situation by
reflecting that literary publication as we know it is historically a
late and unusual development. Poetry in every culture with which I
am familiar began as utterance, a situation which for some reason
seems to be extremely favorable for poetry. The next stage was for
writing to be used as a sort of aide-memoire to utterance. The idea
that the writing is the poem -- that is, that a poem is what we
today call a text -- is generally characteristic of late and
decadent periods. Plato, standing at the end of a great epoch whose
culture was founded on oral verse utterance, saw the problem
clearly:
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of
those who learn to use it, because they will not practice
their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external
characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage
the use of their own memory within them. You have invented
an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your
pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they
will read many things without instruction and will therefore
seem to know many things, when they are for the most part
ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise,
but only appear wise.
And he was right. The German monk who wrote "grammata sola carent
fato" lived in the depths of an age in which, as in our own, poetry
had become the sterile academic exercise of a tiny elite and the
Muse had gone into a coma.
I don't think our present situation has any technological
solution so long as those solutions are still a form of writing.
What's needed is to get back to the utterable source. I'm not sure
how to do this. I most certainly don't mean a society where poetry
is only transmitted in pub readings. I don't know what a modern
poetry of utterance would look like, any more than I know what a
society not based on the domination of the powerful would look like.
Perhaps there may be some hope of something developing in Greece,
India, Russia, the Arab world, and other places where the detachment
of the art of poetry from both human society and the human voice has
not gone to the irreversible extreme which it has in our own
culture.
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