Poetry

is the art, the enterprise.

There is much talk about poetry and its place in culture, and whether or not it is dead. It's tempting to call poetry dead because it is more difficult to see poetry's direct and explosive impact on the cultural landscape the same way one sees movies, television, or music wreaking their specious havoc on the world.

Students of poetry are obsessively taught that their art is esoteric and useless, (the most positive thing you are likely to hear about poetry from the preachers of this doctrine is that THEY "like" poetry, for all it's caveats) even by the most messianic of poets and poetry scholars. At best one can hope to find a professor who teaches a kind of ivory-tower disdain for the realities of art-as-culture: art being pursued for art's sake, almost reveling in the accusations of frivolity or irrelevance leveled at it by the unartistic laity.

That such a pessimistic vision of ultimate futility exists even in academic institutions, the home and nursery of poetry and poets, is troubling. Is poetry indeed dead, then? If its heart is dead, must not the body follow?

Fine, let's all give up and go home.

I kid, of course. The answer is that poetry is not dead, but suffers from an inferiority complex that has been built up through years of elitist thought and isolation. We, as poets, writers, and idea-artists, need to take thorough stock of our art. Not our craft, never our craft. The word craft implies the rude handling and abuse of media. This is one such truth we must acknowledge of our art: it is a pure art, and in certain senses of the word perhaps the purest art.

Poetry must, through the actions and ideological power of its practitioners, realize its true importance. We must not just believe in, or posit the power of poetry, we must know that it is powerful. We must know that it is not a trifle, that we are not wasting our time, that the things we do both in the zone of the poem and out are necessary, in some way, to the human process. We are not isolated intellectuals, and we are not obsessive hobbyists. We are human beings performing a human service.

Poetry, as they say, is due for a comeback.