On Not Being a Poet

"A poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence"--John Keats

I recently attended a public reading by a quite well-established Canadian poet.

It made me depressed. Which is not the effect one gets from art.

To my mind, there was nothing there. I heard only prose, and pedestrian reflections on one man’s daily life. No sound qualities, no vivid images, no deep thought.

It showed the derelict, debilitated state of poetry now. It was not poetry at all, and the somewhat celebrated poet was not a poet.

Reminds me of something Yeats said: “You can either live the life of a poet, or be a poet. You can’t do both.”

Like most contemporary poets, this man was a self-promoter, a marketer, not a poet. Good at dropping names. And that seems pretty much what “poetry” has become. The marketers have driven out the poets.

Don’t misunderstand me. He seemed to be a nice personable guy, enjoyable to be around. Fun to have a beer with, no doubt helpful and encouraging to others. Like any good salesman. It is a legitimate skill, and admirable in its own way. But it is incompatible with poetry.

People are driven to poetry because they have, in some way, been silenced. Because they cannot otherwise say what they need to say. The thing that must be said then develops force and power, like steam in a boiler, and comes out as verse. 

Anyone who is garrulous and talkative is already habitually saying whatever is on their minds. There is no force left over for poetry. What they present as poetry is just more of their usual pedestrian thoughts, without art.

And it is all about them. The focus is on being a poet, not the poem. Which is killing the craft.

You reveal yourself as a poet because you speak little. Poets live with silence, and every poem is ripped out screaming.

A poet must also always tell the truth, painful as it may be, to themselves or others. Without truth there is no beauty. A poet is a prophet. A good salesman, by contrast, says whatever they think the audience wants to hear. 

The two approaches are incompatible from the womb.

What we commonly call poetry now is essentially the opposite of poetry.

In the end, what makes me most depressed about the evening is the thought that this man has wasted his life. He has invested his identity entirely in being a poet. And he was never a poet, and could never be a poet. What could be sadder than seeing someone who has lived his whole life as a lie? And, not having any sense of poetry, he probably has no idea.