Poets and Prophecy

Poets and Prophecy was read as an introduction the poem What Needs No Myth at the Personal Mythologies II reading at Kelly Writers House, September 20, 2003.  

It’s been a long time— probably since Allen Ginsberg unveiled Howl— San Francisco, 1955— since America has produced a convincingly authentic prophet-poet; although you could make an argument for Dylan as one. I do, but the academic establishment does not. Yet. And, ladies and gentlemen, guess who writes the history books. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, poetry at its best is a prophetic art, capable of making its best voices, in Shelley’s words, “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming twenty years before the ascent of Adolf Hitler, the rough beast to end all rough beasts. T.S. Eliot wrote his celebrated Waste Land as a requiem for post-World War I Europe, and wound up anticipating calamities beyond anything he could’ve imagined.

Poets today seem content making smaller statements. They tend to call what is actually a lack of imagination, “maturity.” Witness the effusion of poems weaving dainty nostalgia into tapestries of tepid imagery, and over-polished technical proficiency. How often can one pick up The New Yorker, or The Paris Review, and find one’s self not only moved, but ravished? One sees, in the modern poet, a lack of confidence congruent with a lack of imagination. Modesty is now the balm for all aesthetic ills, the panacea to keep the docile, lamb-like scribe out of the looney bin and on the tenure track. The problem, is that all great art has an element of madness in it, of the Dionysian. Technical proficiency alone won’t do. You have to have something to say, something ineluctable, transcendent, maybe even, dare we say it, prophetic.

I don’t want to create a great build-up for what’s just another one of my poems. I apologize, in fact, for getting a little bit carried away here. Whether or not the poem I’m about to read does carry a little bit of that old prophetic fire, that was my, perhaps overambitious, intention. Only things, as they are wont to do, got a bit twisted, and the poem I wrote wound up expressing the futility of all human prophecy. It is, in fact, a direct refutation of Yeats’ Second Coming, which I espoused not thirty lines ago. If this seems a bit confused, hear me out. The basic crux of this diatribe, which I am only now getting around to, is that poets need to start thinking big again. They need to rage, to tremble, to bleed, and to do it on a large scale. Don’t let a Ploughshares-touting professor mislead you. Big statements are a big deal. If they often lead to big failures, then that’s just a chance we’ll have to take. With that I’ll shut up and read the poem, and hope I can do so without you conspiring to lynch me.