The other day I read a collection of poems by a young St. Louis poet,
Germaine A Thedord (WAIT TIL THE WORLD GETS A LOAD A ME). I was struck
how,a young man in these modern times,fell back upon the prophetic devices,
metaphors and images of Judeo-Christianity in his work and how he applied
them to the present situation.
This brought to mind a quote about the Biblical prophets from PBS's
website concerning a program the networkd did on Apocalyptic Thought
through the ages, that the Old Testament prophets "they were professionals
who spoke to contemporary problems through poetry, often including a small
amount of future prediction to enhance their authority".
Is one role of The Poet that of prophet or seer?
I can think of the example of Nostradamus, who wrote in quatrains. Is
poetry merely a device that is used to present their message, or is there
something about the process that induces a trancelike state wherein a clear
free association and linkage of ideas and events can occur?
There are others I'm sure, an unlikely candidate was Beat poet BOB
KAUFMAN (l925-1986)He was of mixed German-Jewish and African American
parentage. Some believe that the mixture of Jewish, Catholic, and American
African (some call Hoodoo)religious works, traditions and methodologies
influenced all his work.
In 1963, after the assasination of President John F. Kennedy, he took a
vow of silence. He neither spoke nor wrote for the next 10 years.
Finally in 1973, the year U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended, he
started reciting poetry again. Five years later, in 1978, he fell silent
again.
In that time he composed the poem "The American Sun". It contains the
following lines:
". . .HEAVEN UNDRESSES
THE BODY OF LENIN IN THE TOMB AND
DISCOVERS THE LEGS HAVE TURNED BLACK,
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM IS REFUSED THE
SACRAMENT BY HEAVEN. . ."
and:
" . . .THE TOMB OF
LENIN HAS BEEN DESTROYED,
THE BODY OF LENIN IS BEING CARRIED THROUGH
THE CITY . . ."
When Kaufman composed "The American Sun" (I say composed rather than
wrote because he rarely committed any of his work to paper, and we know it
mostly through transcriptions of his recitations made by his friends--which
was also the way in which many prophetic and religious writings, including
the Koran, came down to us) the U.S. was at one of it's lowest ebbs; it had
just lost the Vietnam War, undergone the Oil Crisis and Watergate and
Recession. He composed these words more than ten years before the Berlin
Wall fell, before the Soviet Union was drawn into the quagmire of
Afghanistan, when World Communism looked like an unstoppable goliath that
would soon make the words of Kruschev a reality: "We will bury you."
In a trance, in the fever of creation, did Kaufman somehow see into the
future?
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