5 a.m. Readings

The first thing to come up this morning as I crank up the machina is a snide piece in the newspaper of record (which also holds the record of lousy [non-]reporting on poetry), the, ugh, “liberal” NYT. It sounds like a slightly gentile-ized NY Post piece, and starts: “The cloistered community of American poetry has, in recent months, become a little less like Yeats’s Land of Faery, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue, and a little more like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”” Oh yeah? Well, the article describes resignations and internal dissent about John Hollander’s Frost Medal at the Poetry Society of America. Read it here. I watched the disastrous METS game against the Phillies last night & do not go to the Times Sports page.

It would now seem that with the 20^th century re-discovery of the Ice Age painted caves in Europe, we have made contact with what could be thought of as the back wall of image-making which, especially in its hybrid aspects, evokes mental travel and thus the roots of poetry. While it is possible that there are even older imaginative materials in Africa and Australia, the chances are that researchers will not uncover on these continents the ancient creative range and quality to be found in such caves as Lascaux and Chauvet. While it is thrilling to know where one is ultimately based as an artist, it is equally horrifying to realize that one may also be witnessing the ecological destruction of the fundament that made art possible in the first place. As these massive vectors shift into place and cross, a disturbance in my mind challenges the convictions that I held as a young man: that the most meaningful way I knew of to deal with myself and with the world was to explore poetry and to write it. This is not a back-handed way of suggesting that poetry or art at large is dead, but a recognition that I may be of the first generation to be witness to one of the recuperations of the roots of culture and to the devastations that may make culture as we know it today a thing of the past. Rather than resonating with the magnificent aurochses of Lascaux, the abyss that opens before us today declares itself through the potential extinction of frogs and honey bees, and the accompanying sensations of the empty and lifeless space that humankind has always suspected fueled depth and its analogues of loss.