It's good and dead: long live zombie poetry

[milo]

I wrote this a while back, on another site -- a few things I've seen recently have reminded me of it:

Is poetry dead?  Who cares?  How many times have we had this discussion?  No, it's not dead, you cry.  There's more poetry being written now than there ever was.  Look around you.  The internet is a marvel of communication.  Poets, poets everywhere and something about slimy things.

Blah.  Poetry didn't go through an amazing resurgence with the coming of the internet; what surged was people's ability to get in other people's faces without ever having to properly commit to any kind of relationship.  This nice safe little interface created a haven for the imagination, but there was a problem: imaginations just aren't what they used to be.  As a consequence of two or three generations of being told precisely what to think, how to act, who to vote for and so forth etc ad infinitum, "creativity" has come to mean "see what else is around that you like and think you can manage, then copy it".  The personal diary became the public blog, and poetry in the key of I was soon de rigueur.

I recently tried an experiment with a group of poets who professed to be -- as they always do -- interested in learning.  For discussion I posted a couple of very well known "classic" poems, the first being Blake's A Poison Tree.  If you're not familiar with it, google it.  It's a poem with fairly straightforward metaphors, written in such a way that it should provoke quite a lot of philosophical discussion and speculation.  Instead the prevalent responses were something along the lines of "Blake is bad, why would he do such a thing?" and "how can an apple kill someone?"  Before you shake your head, consider why these are not stupid responses but the result of conditioning.  Let's first look at the I in poetry.  Once a narrative device that we'd have had no trouble separating from the writer him/herself (do we really think Huck Finn wrote his own story?), it's become the only perspective that seems to matter in poetry and must be true.  The I can't lie.  And, it seems, the I most especially cannot be tangled up with metaphor.  How can one thing be another thing? That's just not authentic.  Authenticity means, it seems, a stream of emotional responses to life changing events with arbitrary line breaks to make it look like a poem should.  God forbid we should lie in our poetry, we're so very honest in every other aspect of our lives after all.

The internet brought not a resurgence, but an unholy resurrection.  We have zombie poets who feed on validation, which is just as well since brains are in disturbingly short supply.

It is interesting to note that the Greeks made the god of lying and the god of creativity the same for a reason.  The foundation of every bit of creativity in the world is the lie - as things that aren't are lied into existence and then they are.

Some truths can never be told except through lies.

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I guess for me the key question to put forward for myself and directed at anyone running a poetry site is: Is this (the appearance of zombie poets), a problem that we need to manage or deal with and if so...How do we manage or deal with the problem?

zombie poets, like other zombies, are best avoided.
If necessary I think you can kill one with a silver bullet
or a stake through the heart.