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It's Hell Being a Poet
for release 01-14-07
Washington DC
The Poet's Eye sees that the hardest thing about being a poet is that you can't blink or look away from the truth. If what you write doesn't contain truth, then it is just a pile of scrambled words. No matter how craftily they are arranged, if they don't tell you something about the world or your heart that is true, then they don't constitute a poem.
Ok, what about this one:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Jabberwocky is a poem, not because it makes sense, but because it indicates a truth to the reader, that truth being: Some things are simply absurd.
As Williiam Carlos Williams reminds us, ""It's hard to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." What is found there is truth.
My poetic license has been suspended several times. Oh yes, I've been arrested by the poetry cops for DWI (doggerel while intoxicated.) But my excuse was that it was late at night and I was under duress, my wife was about to pop a pimple and I had to get her to the hospital or the church, I forget which, and that's why I was speeding, occifer.
No, the hardest thing about being a poet is that nobody thinks you have a real job. They don't classify Watching, Listening, Comparison, Analysis, Grokking, Reflection and Writing as work. They only see you thinking and drinking and smoking cigarettes.
But there are benefits to being a poet. We always leave the party with the plumpest women over our shoulders. We can be vague and obtuse and corny and dramatic and self-indulgent. Also, god takes care of his poets. This is what the Nazz had to say about it:
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin-- Matt 6:28
And according to Whitman, these are some of the perks of being a poet:
All enjoyments and properties and money, and whatever money will buy,
The best farms, others toiling and planting and he unavoidably reaps,
The noblest and costliest cities, others grading and building and he domiciles there,
Nothing for any one but what is for him, near and far are for him,
All that a poet is asked in return for these bounties is that he tell the truth. Aye, and there's the rub. The Poet's Eye can never blink nor flinch nor look away. He must observe the ugly truth and then describe it in a painless way. That's his job. It's like having Job's job. The insurance is great but the working conditions are strenuous.
'He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions." Whitman
I've long thought that if ever I wanted to be a coherent human being instead of a poet, that I would want to be like Jubal Harshaw in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange land. He didn't have to worry about being a poet. He just hired one. In the novel, Jubal is a writer that lives on a sumptuous and isolated estate and has three secretaries (think Charlie's Angels) who run around naked and take dictation from him. Every writer's fantasy.
One of Jubal's secretaries is what is called a Fair Witness. This is a tricked-up sci-fi, quasi-religious version of a notary public. She has been trained by a special order of nuns to be able to remember anything she hears or sees. She is a human tape recorder. But, in a sense, this is also the function of a poet--to be one of those irritating people who testifies to the truth.
The words of the true poems give you more than poems,
They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war,
peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and every thing else,
---Whitman, Song of the Answerer
