On the death of the poet in the modern age

As I piece together the poetry of the new world—not of the American West, but of the self-aware consciousnesses that stems specifically from the Romantics—I want to pull my teeth out and give up. We are not in a post-liberation world; we are a leashed generation, with ties to a past we put to sleep. In our chains, we muzzle the Poet: a soul who hears the whispers of what the poet Octavio Paz calls ‘the other voice’. In our faux-enlightened world, these Poets often report their other voice in a recognisable verse: one that is defiant of the status quo, one that serves as an act of rebellion, and one that hurts the other Poets to encounter. Their words act as sirens to the other lost souls who realise how trapped they are in their modernity, in positions of relative power and inferiority. However, one of the problems with the Poet is that not every Poet can produce poetry, let alone Poetry. There is a strong distinction between the two in that poetry is a writing in verse, distinct from prose, and Poetry is the transmission of  what the ‘other voice’ has to say, whether in explicit verse or not. Yet, since this restrained Poet is already a unique subsect of humankind, the Poem grows dangerously rare. 

Why is it, then, if so difficult, painful, and scarce, that we listen to this other voice and pursue it? I think this question is better answered when we unpack the nature of the voice’s message. The Poets frequently sit within the middle class with few notable exceptions, and most have attended a university. The Poets who write frequently come from a distinguished background and live in a state where capitalism reassures them that they should be content, but nevertheless continues to overwork themselves so they never associate monotony with pleasure. Paz reasons that these Poets are the “enemies and victims” of the very modernity that provides them arguable stability. The voice can see both sides of the fence and the Poet sits between them on the ever-growing line without grass. The bourgeoisie is comically untouchable and looks, to the Poet, like the Monopoly Man, had he grown a beer belly and smoked far too many cigars. The proletariat, fearfully within reach, serve as a reminder of the comfort the Poet has and can easily lose. The middle class is afraid of the proletariat, not because of any harm the proletariat could impose on the middle class, but because of the amount of pain they would endure if they slip into the same socioeconomic status. 

Thus, the middle class observes both sides and ignores them. Here, they submit to the ills of the system and the ‘other voice’ grows weak. However, the development of Poetry is a profound act of resistance, defiance, and a beautiful attempt to share the experience of further truths with the world. There is no true capitalistic benefit of Poetry. Anthologies of verse may sell and support the livelihoods of those attached to the literary production chain, but that is where the conformity ends. True Poetry is profoundly anti-capitalist, whether in its words, its emotions, or in its simple existence. When shared at poetry readings, in front of the mirror, or under the tongue after love-making, Poetry sparks a revolution of the soul and reawakens a restlessness we like to blame the machines for silencing. 

To Paz, the other voice is the Poet’s “own, someone else’s, no one else’s, no one’s, and everyone’s.” It is individual in that it is human. The Poem is not something that can be written; it is a sort of revelation and a discovery that seems to exist on some other plane of reality or consciousness that “the poet merely discovers.” This is why Poetry is so important. The Poem could never be mass-produced nor over-printed. You cannot sit a Poet down in a chamber and tell them to write food for the soul. The results will be limericks and haikus without a transcendent truth behind it; the catchiness will linger for a moment before it melts away into obscurity, forgotten along with the other waste of consumption. 

As we continue our shift toward this store-brand, meaningless verse, society continues to shrink the Poet’s stage. We are at risk of never hearing from the other voice again. The modern era provides little space for the study, appreciation, let alone development of the ideas from the other voice. The world today is too loud and cumbersome; the middle class is overworked and desensitised. If the voice cannot hear itself, how could we ever expect the Poet to hear it, let alone share it? The poet Dianne Di Prima offers an excellent example of the real danger we face when she writes: 

“in the middle of our drive over the Nebraska hills and
into colorado, odetta signing, the whole world singing in me the triumph of our revolution in the air
me about to get that down, and you
you saying something about the carburetor
so that it all went away.”

The other voice manifests as a trance the Poet falls into. “A whirlwind of higher forces,” to steal the phrase from Artaud. It is delicate and fine, and if the humble drum of the carburetor penetrates too far, then it will be too late to salvage our voice. 

Without the other voice, I fear the world would become unrecognisable; it is not the inherent good of humanity, but it is the voice of the thus far uninterrupted, collective soul. It speaks from ancient truths otherwise undiscoverable today and ensures that there is still time. The Poet must survive, because although we have the old Poems, we need something for the modern Poet to discover, and open the door to new Poetry. Since the material world changes far too frequently (for nothing we create is infinite), if the only piece of stability, the Poet, were to erode completely, I suspect we would be on the forefront of Ferlinghetti’s sixth mass extinction on Earth. The death of the human spirit would bring far more devastation than the death of the human species; the species without the spirit, as we are almost certainly bound to see, will allow for the evil of the mind to run unchecked. Although this final stage has already progressed, we must try to revive this insurgent art: the one common link amongst humankind.