Purpose in Poetics - Narcissism and Neglect

    
What happens when people take "write what you know," and "poetry is personal," too far?  Stupid, self-centered poets.  Or perhaps I should say, "more self-centered," if I'm being honest.  Today I look at why I think a lot of poetry from my generation sucks.

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     We live in a visual world. Television was just the start, providing attention-grabbing visual entertainment with minimal effort. As the medium got older, and TV became more pervasive, the number of programs increased as the quality decreased. The Boob Tube is just that - you can be a couch potato and funnel fun into your frontal lobe for a limited expenditure of energy. With computers, and later, smartphones, we've found a way to make content boobery interactive. When you can digitally water your digital vegetables from anywhere you actually are, why bother with other forms of entertainment? Why bother interacting at all? If you were to add up all the time together, my friends and I have probably spent several full work days together just absorbed in our phones (yes, I am as guilty as anybody). It's just so goddamn addictive.

But what's this got to do with poetry?


     Well, poetry is affected by these trends of attention, too. I'm not a well-traveled man by any means, but in my small sphere of existence, I've seen a troubling decline. Attending poetry readings, I see a lot of audio poetry. It seems my fellow New Jersey poets have an obsession with sweet sounds and dramatic pacing. If it's not exceedingly rhythm-based, you'll no doubt find that it's a humorous poem. I've seen a lot of "stand-up" poets, and heard a lot of poems that avoid causing the audience any unwanted throught processing. My (somewhat minor degree of) contempt for these sorts of poetics comes not from my denial of their "poem-ness" but instead from my belief that poetry should be MOVING, it should be INSPIRING, and it should send a message.

     It's not any one aspect of these poets' pieces that makes them, "bad" - in fact, I tend to like a lot of what I hear from poets nowadays.  Hell, I even write stuff that's similar to what I've described.  But there's a bigger picture here: the orgy of our selves, the sinister circlejerk that started with television (perhaps the radio?) and has made itself a hallmark of our times.   It's more a problem of portfolio than any individual poem.  It seems as though today most people want to be Bukowski and write their gritty perspectives so that everyone can see just how beat they are, or, even worse, they just want to get a rise out of their audience.  I look at Wordsworth and Whitman and Blake and find classics, compositions that map divinity or imply morality. Maybe those classics highlight secret places in humanity, help the silent minority to taste freedom through shared experience.  When I see a poet who plucks at the strings of divinity and pulls out the perfect bittersweet note, best believe I'll let them know.  But mostly, when I see or hear a poem nowadays, I'd say there's a 75% chance it will involve something from the following list:

- Fucking, remembered
- Heartache/Sorrow
- Being Misunderstood
- The Poet's Gender
- A humorous version of any of the above
- Any combination of the above.

My generation is so fucking egotistical! Again, these are appropriate topics for poetry, but each poet I meet seems obsessed with a poetics of self.  It's as though my generation thinks they're entitled to have everyone hear about ever love lost or brooding moment spent near a graffiti-bearing brick wall.  To hear so many poets sound so much like their peers is disheartening - everyone's taking cues from one another and developing this narcissistic culture of neglect in poetry.  To me, poetry is about the expression of divinity, and that expression can take many forms.  Sure, you can write a sex poem and invoke the divine, but it rarely happens.  Perhaps you're more musically inclined, and when you play with the verbal flow of your words, that's your hint of divinity - but people need to realize that just throwing together words that rhyme while you read them in pretty patterns (or anti-patterns) isn't really poetry.  That's a start - for sure - but remember as you dazzle people with your rapping that at one point, Vanilla Ice did, too.  Personally, I blame this self-centered, thoughtless poetry on two old and very fallacious axioms:

1) "Write what you know."
2) "Poetry is personal."

These are great bits of advice - to an extent.  However, when taken, together, to their logical conclusion, what results is a pervasive philosophy of self-centrism in poetry. Certainly, write what you know, but don't simply write about your feelings. Sure, poetry is personal - but don't just write about yourself. If we want poetry to mean anything to the world at large, if we want to make a difference through written words, have a point, people! Make it universal, comment on humanity! A poem about sex with your lover set to a heartbeat pace is pretty, but when that's all you write, you're pulling the teeth out of the medium.