Poetry is dead, long live Poetry

I often carry on about my computer getting dragged into black holes but this time it really did. Apart from trees falling down on phone lines and stuff… long story but the short of it is that I now have a new phone line and a new computer too. Not sure if I’m glad because I must admit that not having a computer or a phone line did free me up for other pursuits, like painting with real paint; reading real books; writing with real pens etc - not that I pursued any of them besides the reading but I did have good intentions. Anyhow, alas/alack, now I’m binary bound and shackled once more.

This laptop takes a little getting used to. It doesn’t have the patina that my old monster had. Doesn’t make the same comfortably familiar Cranking Victorian Machinery noises, like an old and rusty (but faithful) robot-dog called up out of its basket for a spot of reluctant cat-chasing. But it’s okay. It will do.

I was amazed to find that famous people have been leaving entertaining comments on this blog in my absence – ok, one semi-famous person anyhow. See “Poet as Hired Gun”. I had thought that this blog was fairly innocuous and a bit boring, with at most about five occasional readers, but it just goes to show. This month it was Mandy De Waal, she-poet who runs with wild horses (?) in the Magaliesberg, and still manages to hold up a well paid day-job too. Mandy doesn’t do garrets, and is ‘empowering’ other ‘poets’ to follow suit. There is a lot of Added Value in it.

Here is a comment posted by Gwen Watkins to Mandy’s original article about poetry and business, which can be found at http://www.biz-community.com/Article.aspx?c=18&l=196&ai=9575

“The concept of using poets to pursue a political agenda is hardly new, nor the idea of persuading workers that "imaginative" ideas will in any way set them free.

Many poets were used by the state or tacitly wrote to please. For as many freedom poets as you can find, I can find those that glorified the state. Even Shakespeare was not above twisting the truth so as not to annoy Queen Elizabeth I – the play Richard III is not in the least accurate but the truth did not set you free in those ‘enlightened’ times – it put you in the Tower of London.

Poetry is about the flight of imagination – it springs from deep and true emotions. It’s something I have done for forty years but never on command. Shaped poetry to achieve an end is no longer poetry and as for praise singing – its very name tells you exactly what its purpose is – propaganda set to rhythm.”

Which was very well said, I thought.