pOETICS of cONVERSION

Poetics of Poetry

(Feb 19/06)
Having read Amatoritsero Ede’s polemic on the state of the poetic form I feel propelled to compose my own polemic, a leprotic row, a quarrelsome diatribe, perhaps. Plato’s greatest fear for a perdurable society was the sensual, riotous evocations of the poets. For they were the true antagonists of the Republic, the enemies of the Open Society, the purveyors of poetic sodomy, the sedition of the masses through meter and rhyme. It was Heidegger’s contention that the poet was the true philosopher, the Zarathustrian naysayer willing to plumb the depths of ontological insecurity. The poetic form is the Form of Forms, the template on which knowledge, both sensate and insensate, is predicated.

The German language, as one example, was irrevocable altered with the genocide of the Jewry in Eastern Europe in the 1940’s, never to be fully repatriated or re-appropriated. It was up to those who were subjected to the most horrid inhumane atrocities, a Bruno Schulz or a Paul Celan, to find a way to express man’s inhumanity to man through verse and poetics. They re-appropriated the German language to evoke the disturbing atrocities that man had perpetrated against his fellow man. To write, express and evoke such barbarity, they had to use the language of the perpetrator, the idiom of the genocide. It was only from within this language, this idiomatic slaughterhouse, that they could express the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man.

Poetry evokes the carnal appetite for the ugly and the beautiful. Poetry pushes one away as it draws one in, drawing one into the beatific and the monstrous, but away from acting on the monstrosities that it reveals through its unveiling. Poetry exposes, it does not hide. Poetry encourages dialogue, repatriation of language and emotion; it does not do away with both, with humanness. The poet is a curiosity seeker, a lover of the incongruent and the harmonious. The poet takes great joy in parsing together seemingly disparate words and evoking a sundry whole, a demulcent of the seemingly incongruent.

The poet is a Nietzschean naysayer, a parser of the sensual, an evoker, a lover of the riotous and disparate, and most importantly, a yeahsayer. The poet is a dialectician, an ontological voice for those without a voice and for those voices that go unheard or are discounted as unworthy of epistemic validation. The poet is a theorist whose chosen form of stylus is the hammer, the hammer of ideological/social and political deconstruction. The poet is a blacksmith, the anvil his mnemonic sounding board, the hammer his Thoradic roar and thunder.