The history of the poem as an art form is very long, reaching back to at least 4000 BCE. It’s not surprising that the means by which the poem expresses itself has evolved over such an expanse of time, shifting from a mostly lost oral tradition to writing to print to digital screens.
But the poem’s origins in an individual self, with the human body as its instrument, have remained central to its nature and I would go so far as to say its purposes. Historically speaking, the performed poem is nearly indistinguishable from “chant” or “song” — accompanied by an instrument or not — as the pitched voice enters shared airspace.
But in this speedily changing age, how do these purposes continue to exist? Why do there continue to be poems when so many other kinds of expression are available? Now that poems can be made on the spot through AI (with form and content prompted by a user), how do we distinguish these poem facsimiles from the real thing? Is there a difference?
The question has become increasingly important with the rise of authoritarian political systems whose means of control is to take away individual experience. Sincere analysis and feeling are replaced by received ideas and fabricated emotion, thoughtful expression by jargon and political rhetoric.
In these fraught days, I’m especially interested in contemporary poets writing in English whose works seem to carry on with what I view as the poem’s fundamental purposes. I’m thinking in particular about American prosodic traditions as well as poetic legacies of resistance.
Living on the Outer Cape for nearly 30 years has made me aware of other aspects of the poem’s nature. To what extent does the poem have analogues in the nonhuman world? What does whale song, for example, have in common with the human poem?
Thrilling discoveries are being made about cetacean society and ocean soundings. This research promises to enlarge our ideas about what constitutes culture and community as well as to confirm what binds us to one another through shared song. As Czeslaw Milosz reminds us in his poem “Incantation,” we, Earth’s overseers, have been given “the estate of the world to manage.”
At the opening of Robert Pinsky’s translation of the Milosz poem, made in Berkeley in 1968, the Polish poet declares:
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
Milosz goes on to make (and prove) the case that a clear-eyed poet sets “universal ideas in language,” using imaginative writing to “put what should be above things as they are.” An “Enemy of despair and a friend of hope,” such a poem saves “austere and transparent phrases/ from the filthy discord of tortured words.”
As Milosz knew first-hand, totalitarian regimes are made especially nervous by poets; they do their best to silence and destroy them. Milosz understood his art’s power, writing about it with clarity and conviction in his prescient lectures, collected in The Witness of Poetry. We are not poetry’s witnesses; poetry is the witness to us.
But can political darkness be defeated through poetic incantation composed by real human beings? Victory sounds more plausible if one considers that literacy is itself a form of magic. What an amazing trick it has been to pass ideas across centuries and continents simply by the arrangement of letters on the printed page, and that social reforms became possible through such “magical” sharing of democratic ideas. So, too, the prayerful chant may bring about change through focus of intention, allowing the imagined to become actual.
Just as the poet Shelley declared that poets are the world’s “unacknowledged legislators,” Milosz affirms that poetry and philosophy — the light of reason and knowledge — are allies “in the service of the good.” Rising to his poem’s conclusion with a flight of fancy, Milosz ends by declaring with experienced certainty:
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
Mary Maxwell will be teaching “American Prosodies” this spring in a continuation of last year’s “What Is a Poem?” class at the Open University of Wellfleet. She lives in Truro.
