[Newspoetry] Poetic Revolt (a valentine's day poem)

[Donald L Emerick]

NewsPoetry is revolutionary, because the news is revolting, anyway, and poetry is a style of commentary upon, and not a cause, alas, of the news.  Not even the greatest piece of poetry itself could cause any news to be.  Poetry happens in the universe next door, on the mirror's other side, its underside, its reflecting side.

I use the word style where the word form, or even the ego-maniacal term structure, would do -- for poetry is always some matter of styles and stylishness, of the fashionable and outrageous.  Heidegger seems to call his style "ways" or "stations" as if he were on the way to poetry, to technology.  Peripatetics have long dominated philosophy at least since the time of Socrates and Plato -- who were always walking along, yakking their silly heads off.

Unlike Heidegger, though, these Greeks fear poets and their poetry, generally.  Poetry resembles thinking -- and yet it is all about emoting, as well.  One is never supposed to shrug poetry off -- it ought to scar the souls of others in the same ways that its poet has such scars deep within him.  Thinking hides the ways from emotions.

Poetry is a disturbed and disturbing communication, by a soul that is willing to be responsible for its disturbance.  Poetry calls the dead forth from their yet open graves: do not be so bound up in your burial clothes; unwind those rags and come to life alive.

Poetry causes nothing, but it sometimes celebrates what is or, by its desecrations, calls the dead to attend to the qualities of their funeral decorations.  In either case, Poetry creates nothing, but brings to consciousness what is always already present, waiting to be seen, if it be lurking out of sight and sound and sense.  And, when it is not lurking out there, your poetry is trite and boring, too familiar a scene to illustrate any vital difference.

Poetry does not cause love, for example -- no one has ever fallen in love with a maiden or a man because their names rhymed or rhythmed or, alas, reasoned.  Oh, Helen, thy beauty is to me as dusty as the boring moments legends never tell, but the words that Poe sang were truly reflexively true of themselves, alone.  Love is surely just a verbalism that words invented imitatively.

Poetic beauty sets its own standards, forms hierarchies -- as every aesthetic always does.  Beauty standards allow a market to form, a technology to thrive -- mass imitations of the sublime are the nearest many will ever get to a heaven -- and even a manufactured skin-deep heaven is light-years better than any of the most shallow hells.

I'd say all this in the rough vernacular that the Spineless Swilliam speaks so much better than I, if I ever spoke in the vernacular with anyone else; those fictional dialogical tones sound so real as to make me think of a detective novel by Mickey Spillane or Sam Spade.

I may do plays on words, but I do not do plays of words -- even with all the staging and scene-lighting and sound-systems that I do.  No poem of mine has a conversation with you, or yet intimates how you talk or should talk.

Oh, the revolution?  You can start it without me.  Turn out the lights, roll over, and go back to sleep, my love.