Thursday, August 18, 2016

Becoming a Poet

When I was about twelve years old, I discovered that I had a lot to say that I couldn't share with anyone.  It was the revelation that I had a private inner world that was mine alone, and that others would have difficulty understanding, having not walked in my particular shoes.

I wrestled with ways to make myself comprehensible to others, and quite by accident, discovered the primal catharsis of poetry.

My first poems were barely intelligible to myself, let alone to others, but they were full of the narcissistic insecurities and boastfulness of my adolescence.  What's more, they showed that I was grappling with a big world that I had just begun to become consciously aware of.  That world, particularly North American (Canadian) society, I didn't quite realize yet, places little or no value on the "I" inside of each of us.  We are seen as wealth-creating machines (or wealth-draining parasites, ominously) that acquire status (significance) in the world according to how efficiently we create wealth, and how conspicuously we display what we've acquired.

We are all poets, deep inside, yet we find a tiny audience for serious poetry and prose in our society, and even fewer of us become adept at expressing our inner lives' world of visions, sensations and the stories that come to us from Memory.  We live in an age that is indifferent, even hostile to the real experiencing human being, an age with genocides and war machines that speak of the nascent totalitarianism that is leading us to disaster.  How can poetry make a difference when desires are focussed on gold and crimson-stained power-worship?  Who listens to a poet, or an artist, or anyone who communicates the ethereal spirit of Being?

"Who cares?" is the voice we hear from above, the voice of billionaires, politicians and bureaucrats.  Who really cares about the quality of inner experience in people's lives - after all, one doesn't rise in this world unless one places oneself first, and others are only obstacles and tools along the road to success.  But we hear a voice crying out in our society - the almost universal desire of the young for fame, attention - the recognition that they exist, that they matter, and that they have important things to say.

A world of billions is crying out, "I am here!  My existence has meaning..." but their cries fall on deaf ears.  "I matter, you matter, we all matter!"  Where being powerful, or equivalently having the ears of the powerful is a privilege for the few, there seems to be no answer to our dilemma.

Becoming a poet really means finding who you are, and making some humane sense of the world we live in.  Poetry, prose, art and music warm the heart, and illuminate the hearts of others for all to see.  Change needs a catalyst, and the hidden force of our times is the frustrated inner Me in all of us.

As politicians and corporations skilfully exploit that frustration for their own purposes, many of us try to give channels of expression to the bottled-up millions, before their lives end in angry confusion, and before their bitterness erupts in bloodshed yet again.  Being a poet is remaining, or recapturing the spirit of being young, inquisitive and idealistic at heart.  Becoming a poet is simply learning to just be, accepting the realities of the world we live in, and struggling to make each individual life matter.

If only Time could tell us if it is on our side.