I was listening to Elizabeth Alexander being interviewed on NPR. Alexander was able to make statements about the places one goes in poems, and the sort of psychological necessities, the way poems give poets and readers and listeners a certain useful space to inhabit. It’s amazing that some people have the perspective, the experience, the wisdom to be able to offer such confident phrasings. My own perspective is more like lament. Lament for the time when poets were, in the Greek sense of the word, the makers of the world. When culture was transmitted orally, and the role of the poet was the one who intoned our history. I’m going to offer an interpretation of how poetry’s role and use has changed. And I’ll suggest the implications of those changes.

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Poets have, now, a diminished role. And yet, there are more people writing poems in the world today than at any time in history. How do I know that? Candidly, it’s a guess. I have heard a significant factoid (which is something one comes to know that doesn’t change one’s behavior): There are more slaves in the world today than at any previous time. It is believable in the sense that the earth’s population is larger than at any previous time. Percentage-wise, slavery may be much diminished on our planet. But in terms of raw numbers, it is evidently true that there are more people whose lives are wholly owned and controlled by other people than at any other time in human history. Contemplating this - really pondering the implications of this - is so vastly sad that one must do the inevitable shutting off. It’s a hard return to segue back to the burgeoning number of poets, but let’s do it: there are more venues, online and in print, than at any other time in human history. Poets seem to be so numerous that one cannot swing the proverbial cat without hitting one. I’ve lived and written in the same small city for the past decade, and still, the names of poets who read publicly are rarely familiar to me. Reading around in journals, in online journals, in Poetry, and link-hopping on poets’ websites bring me to the same conclusion: there are more people writing poems now than ever before.

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On one hand, poetry has ceased to obtain. On the other hand, why are so many people engaged in poetic writing? Could it be, as Elizabeth Alexander suggested, that poetry is a sort of backlash against a culture thriving so vitally (and vapidly) on rapid electronic information? I don’t know that it’s even necessary to make such a tie. I don’t think that one needs to justify the existence of poetry by saying it exists in reaction to some other aspects of human or literary culture. It’s enough to take poetry as an a priori desire or need. Dense, freighted, musical language is edifying.

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Clearly, the practice of poetry intrigues people in ways that suggests our primary relationship is with our selves, that self that then must encounter the world. Consider, then, that the locus of poetry has moved, but only slightly. In oral culture the words of the poet mediated between the individual and that individual’s understanding and reception of the community. Now poetry is just inside the skin: one doesn’t use poetry as a public tool to extrapolate about the world; one uses poetry to interpolate. I worry that the preponderance of poets may mean that people are more enslaved to a self. Ought we be more tied to others? Here, again, is the covenant: define your self by how you treat others.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

David Epstein, Guest Blogger

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David A. Epstein, Ph.D. works as a house-spouse and a carpenter. He is a member of the Brickwalk poetry group in Connecticut, and is a board member of The Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens. He has published poems in Poetica, Poetic Hours, The Lyric, Blue Collar Review, and Shofar. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor