> Discussions about anything can be a load of hot air; I can't see how the
>>> human passions and desires and fragilities that they express are not,
>>> however, part of life.
>>>
Sometimes I think when something happens is totally beyond our influence or
control, it's natural (in anger, grief, whatever) to go on the attack, or
eliminate the value of something else.
David, with total respect for your sadness and/or whatever strong feelings
surround the situation of your friend, I don't think poetry or the
discussion of it is the blame. It's true, I would agree, poetry is often,
for the most part, useless in the immediate situation - tho I suspect one
often hears refrains from familiar work that are "on target."
I was once in the start of a major - and obviously to be disastrous - civil
war. Many of us were writing like mad - poem after poem - to see if somehow
our language would some divert the principals to 'negotiations.' Lots of
luck - maybe similar to trying to stop a Tsunami. In that situation I kept
telling myself this sense of futility - the futility of language to be an
instrument that could alter the present - was the reason poet's wrote with
the possibility of a work becoming 'immortal.' (I don't even know if,
finally, I kept those poems!) Helas, even once considered 'immortal', poems
get thrown out of the canon, even violently so!
When somebody is 'over the top', drugs and containment trump language.
Poems, healing come later. As to people who are clearly on their way to the
other side, the presence of well read poetry can be transfiguring and part
of the process. Then there are the poems for us who participate and survive
each of these passings.
Anger, your anger here, I suspect, a natural part of a starting core.
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
|