PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION VI

Postmodern literature emerged out of the Leftist Marxism of the sixties. Or so I have read. I would rather call this literature ‘Progressive Deconstructionism’ because it progresses toward a complete disintegration of disclosure. If reason does not matter in so much of what universities teach, including poetry, it should be no surprise that basic facts are offensive to some students. And this is why the most radical among them riot when they do not get their way. Some postmodern poems are even less definite and more tenebrous than Thompson’s Two Ghazals. We should not let the complexion of this kind of poetry hang by just an example or two. And we don’t have to because I have an entire book of examples. Mercifully, the worthless volume was priceless, by which I mean: free. The opinion that this mad poetry was born in the mind of the Left is all but completely proven considering where the twenty-seven poets featured in the anthology reside. The installments, then, in this book called, Verse, Vol. 7, No. 1, are written by poets living where we would expect them to live: in democratic districts. Except for seven of them (five of whom have no place of residence given), they live in the following places: San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, northern California, Sebastopol (also in California), Washington State, Washington D. C., New York City, Connecticut, London (in England), Toronto, and Vancouver. Here follow two examples of postmodern verse from this book. They are, by no means, atypical; these two examples are pretty much what the whole book is like. I will give a whole stanza from each poet, not to suggest that taking poetry of this kind out of context is possible.         

From Making It Up by Rae Armantrout

What do you call it

when men dress up

as barber poles:

a different century

or an ice-cream parlor

full of crying kids?

A father hit one and said,

“I didn’t touch you.”

From Ruck by Lary Timewell

Reconstruction ancyclicals,

superencipherment of the

snug in antebellum, one

Ophuls needed to

smartkid antidote,

discuss expenditures,

turf lurkers,

bundle negatives,

scratch horses,

and shun statistics against

“a steady backbeat of abiding concerns,”

like, say,

Reconsider Baby.

 

Both poems defy explication except to say that they are inexplicable. The second of these is more than merely sesquipedalian: the inclusion of long words just because. A couple of its long words are invented, not out of thin air, but out of a brain that has been trained to believe that this is what poetry should look like and sound like. Obviously, these poems are impossible to interpret. The editor of this volume admits that footnotes would not help us to understand the meaning of such poetry, as it so frequently consists of what he honestly calls ‘wholesale derangement.’ Indeed, because more sense can be produced by the ‘See ‘N Say Story Maker’ by Mattel, a toy that combines prepared phrases to delight the toddler at the push of a button. I will push this button right now and get more sense from Mattel’s toy than from the two poems quoted above: “The cat sat on a fat goat on the moon.” One more time, because it’s so much fun to make fun of postmodern poetry: “The turkey kissed a barking ‘woof woof’ bug in my shoes.” 

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION V

About these Two Ghazals, Lane comments, “It proceeds by couplets not necessarily linked together by rational thinking.” This is correct. The poems are irrational. But then he adds, “They are examples of poetic logic.” This observation is a foolish follow-up because logic is ‘rational thinking,’ which is hardly irrational. Logic is the science of reasoning, or the ‘grammar of reason,’ as R. C. Trench calls it. Irrationality and logic are antithetical to each other. The poems cannot be examples of both. Logic is the process by which conclusions are reached through methodical thinking; and methodical thinking cannot be irrational thinking. The poems cannot be both irrational and logical, for something that is logical has gone through a process, not of irrationality, but of reason. Logic goes, then, with reason, not irrationality. That something—even a poem—is both irrational and logical at the same time, is a contradiction and impossibility. If the parts of something are not linked by rational thinking, it is absurd to assert that that something is logical. Contradictions of this kind are the norm in circles where truth is treated as relative. Truth as relative is itself a contradiction; therefore it is no surprise that irrational poems and irrational criticism flow from that secular tenet. The idea that truth is relative is a proposition that what is true for one person may be false for another; but relative truth is a chimera: that which exists in the imagination alone. We might imagine that one person believes that bread is nourishing while his fellow believes that a stone is nourishing and that neither person judges the other for what he eats and that each one eats his choice of food to good effect. That bread is a source of food is true. That the stone is a source of food is false. This is a fact no matter what a person imagines the truth to be. A stone for food only works in the imagination; irrational poems that are logical, likewise. “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?” (Luke 11.11.) Postmodern poetry is as dumb as stones. We ask for nourishment instead. It would be cruel to teach infants that stones will nourish their bodies. It is cruel to teach children that avant-garde poetry will nourish their minds. Only cruelty would coerce pupils to admire nonsense and to imitate the writing of it. But that is what postmodern poets and philosophers of relative truth, through academia, are guilty of. They push their chimerical inventions into classrooms and libraries because the only way people will pay a moment’s attention to what they write is by duress or by accident. People do not want to read material that is close to being absolutely incomprehensible. It is true that sinners are naturally bent against metaphysical truth as we have it in the Bible. But the rejection of God’s truth is near the top of our slippery slope. Near the bottom is the denial of common sense. Denial on this level is not to everyone’s liking because not everyone is as close to the bottom as experimental writers are. And this is where coercion and peer pressure come in. Even when modern art is as ugly as debris—even when innovation in poetry is imbecilic—what student couldn’t be pressured with a frown into denying the testimony of his intuition? Postmodern poetry is a playground for persons pretending to be poets. It could be ignored except for the fact that defenseless pupils are forced to read it, accept it, and even participate in it. At the back of the bus the other day, a mentally disadvantaged man blurted out, in fits and starts, words that seemed chosen at random. This is what the newest poetry is like, except for the fact that our poets don’t have acute mental illness for an excuse. A couple of teenage girls giggled embarrassingly each time the disabled man blurted out. We might blame them for this; but we should not blame them at all for laughing at retarded poetry.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION IV

It would be better for the reputation of the poet, John Thompson, to have it discovered that his poems were only doodles, and that before he could throw them out, someone—an enemy—submitted them to the paper in the author’s name in order to discredit his good character. But these newfangled poets mean what they say when they write their meaningless, meandering verse.  They believe that poems like these ought to use up paper and be dignified as parts of a book. If it were merely about the miscarriage of craft, poems like these would deserve a gentler return than inhospitable criticism. Anyone who has written poems has often missed the mark. Semel insanivimus omnes. (We have all played the fool once.) But poems like these—poems that insult our intelligence by communicating nothing more cerebral than a confession of mental derangement—are not fit even for lunatics to peruse. Off-the-wall writers of junk verse need to be shamed. Shame precedes repentance. Decadent writers need to be jarred into recognition of how mad their verses make them appear even to halfwits. The voice in Two Ghazals does confess to madness: “I’m quite mad: never see the sun.” But if Mr. Thompson’s intention is to write as a madman would, it’s not poetry, is it? And if this is poetry, the same thing can be said about it that ordinary people say about modern art: Anyone can do it, though most of us would rather do something constructive instead. No doubt, the author of Two Ghazals would have liked everyone to avow that this is poetry, regardless of what voice may be identified in it. No matter what praise this poet has been the recipient of, and no matter what progress poets of his school pretend to have made, these poems read like the reflections of a delusional soul. “If I wash my hands will I disappear?/I’ll suck oil from Tobin’s steel and walnut.” When men were more intelligent, though admittedly less advanced than we are scientifically, a person who uttered discordant speech from his imagination was evaluated, not by a literary critic, but by a doctor. From 1758: “Deluded imagination…is…an indisputable but an essential character of Madness” (W. Battie, A Treatise on Madness, pp. 5, 6.) Poems like Thompson’s Two Ghazals exhibit incongruity. Something that is made up of incongruous parts is called a chimera: an incongruous delusion. “The perception of Chimeras…exist no where except in the brain of a Madman” (Ibid., p. 42.) Is it not for our advantage that writings from the age of medical bloodletting may be used to shame our literary pretensions and daftest writers? From 1811: “Alas! not only darkness, thick as night, has overtaken them; they are bewildered in the imaginations of their disordered minds, and in the pursuit of fancied objects, or in the flight from fancied terrors, hurried into the midst of dangers” (Stevenson Maggill, On Lunatic Asylums, p. 11.) They are hurried into the midst of dangers—dangers like self-harm and suicide. Both Rothko and the author of Two Ghazals killed themselves. Poems like Two Ghazals convey less meaning than the medley of words that a person might remember from his last nightmare. It so happens that sometimes I recall sayings from my dreams and that sometimes I bother to write them down. For a teaching moment, I am fetching one of these right now. So in a dream, a woman said this to me: “When my world revolves around stories, I know I’m going to write one; when the world revolves around mine, I know I’ve written one.” This is a well-ordered proverb, notwithstanding the hubris of the ethereal woman who contrived it. Unlike the miscommunication in Two Ghazals, it is not only well-ordered, but discernible. Definite meaning may be gathered from it. The saying seems thoughtful enough to pass for the fruit of rumination. It is remotely possible that I subconsciously absorbed the proverb from a book or an audio medium and that it manifested in the unconscious state of my dream. I must say this because C. H. Spurgeon came by a whole sermon in a similar manner. But even allowing for this potentiality, isn’t it interesting that more meaning may be obtained by accident in the dream of a conservative Christian than can be found in poems painstakingly composed by a postmodern poet? This is so startling that it should be spine-tingling. What passes for poetry today bears the image of mental illness, the absence of pathology in the author notwithstanding. 

I was going to say that there aren’t any gems to be salvaged from the rubble of these two poems and that by a random trip to an actual dump more treasure might be found. There is one gem, however, in the first line of Thompson’s second poem, about which Patrick Lane’s comments are appropriate: “Listen to that beautiful ‘bangs a tin wing in the wind.’ The line flies away from you as if it were alive; the sounds feel wonderful in the mouth and ear.” I agree. Even a groundbreaking (in the ditch) poet can’t resist saying something charming when a lyrical clang (like the sound of a shovel scraping between stones in the mud, for example) flashes through his mind. There may be an interspersion of assonance or alliteration or some other marvel in whatever any poet writes. Even a vacuum cleaner can leave a pretty pattern in its wake. One of the most beautiful designs I ever saw was in the lines that a vacuum cleaner left at the front of a church. An artist could not have drawn the female form any better. In his autobiography a man testified to being arrested by a similar sight in a cloud formation. Sporadic lines of graceful speech from a functional brain are not only likely, but inevitable. Any juggler of words will have serendipitous moments. Because of his commitment to the barren landscape that he believes he must paint, he might be trying to keep all flowers out of view. But a fortuitous vision of beauty is irresistible; and so the poet of dead words puts a tulip or two in his picture. How ‘tin wing in the wind’ came to be, however, is known only to the author of it. It might have, for all we know, taken days to compose.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION III

What is missing from Two Ghazals by John Thompson? Answering this question, even partially, must yield more light about the poems than what the content can tell us, for something so near to absolute disorder is not subject to point-by-point analysis, nor does it deserve to be treated so deservingly. No one can tell what the poems mean because the poems reach no conclusion. The author does not make his poems make sense. “He raves; his words are loose as heaps of sand, and scattered wide from sense” (John Dryden.) Poems without aim are not meant to be meaningful. Lane quotes Thompson, the author of the poems, “My interest in the form lies in the freedom it allows—the escape from brief lyric unity.” Lane comments further down, “So many people say they don’t read poetry because they don’t understand it, or say that ‘modern’ poetry lacks something (meaning rhyme and meter.) What they really struggle with is the unpredictability of the modern poem.” Our struggle is not with unpredictability, though, but with unattractive aimlessness. Mr. Lane, moreover, is being overly generous when he says that people ‘struggle’ with poetry like Two Ghazals. They do not bother to stick around long enough to struggle with it, nor should they. When metrical beat and brief lyric unity are absent, there is no rhythm. If there is one essential element to poetry, it is rhythm. Without rhythm, poetry is in a death throe if it is not already dead. Provide symmetry and reason, which together, form cohesion, and the poet might draw some readers. He might get more attention, then, than occasional pretended notice.  

What is missing when brief lyric unity, rhyme, meter, and therefore, euphony, are absent? These elements are not only missing from Two Ghazals, but from present-day poetry generally. Without concision, or brevity; metrical beat, or meter; similarity of sound, or rhyme; songlike expression, or melody; congruous thought, or unity, there is not much left to be desired in a poem, nothing left to please the ear or inform the mind—nothing left, moreover, to be desired in literature. There is nothing left, then, but disconnected phrases that mean whatever the reader wants them to mean. Why do poets even bother to write abortions like Two Ghazals? They do it because it is the next natural regression in the downfall of literature. Why was cubism followed by surrealism and abstract expressionism instead of something easier to fathom? It is simply because the Western world was still going downhill; therefore distorted reality was followed by unreal art. Now that quality is no longer the criterion for success, a man bereft of talent can be called a great painter. Mark Rothko’s paintings can be bested by any toddler worth his salt; but his meritless canvases sell for millions. The impressionists would think us mad to like the paintings of Rothko; Victorian poets would think us mad to like Thompson’s Two Ghazals. If we like paintings that are just horizontal lines of paint on a canvas, or if we like pell-mell confusion palmed off as poetry, we might not be insane; but our saner forefathers might recommend, at least, the artists that we like to an asylum.              

In a book that I do not have, called Stilt Jack, Mr. Thompson explains what a Ghazal is. I don’t care what it is. I don’t expect it to mean anything because the poems underneath it don’t mean anything. The word does not exist in either Webster’s or Oxford’s. I’m not looking anywhere else. It may be a form of poetic expression; and Thompson’s Two Ghazals may be faithful examples of that expression. I don’t want to know any more about a Ghazal than that. To me, a Ghazal is just a word used as a title for something someone stupidly calls poetry. The title of that book, Stilt Jack, is telling, though not much. The postmodern poet often puts one word beside another to say something unique but unfathomable—something that is very likely to have never been said before. He likes to produce confusion through fusion. Meaning is not a criterion for him. This oddball practice is a postmodern poetry distinction. The words ‘Stilt’ and ‘Jack’ might never have been placed side by side before the right ‘poet’ came along. It might be true, now, until forever, that Mr. Thompson was the first person to put those two words beside each other. In his poems, one phrase is put behind another with no detectable concern for meaning. This is the postmodern poet revealing his spiritual condition to us. Since, to him, truth is relative, abstract verses preponderate. His glory is to acquire a distinctive voice through abstraction. To supply the same meaning to everyone would be old-fashioned. He would rather tell everyone something, no matter what it is, by saying nothing specific. Traditional elements of poetry are not needed for writing this kind of verse. Sense and beauty are hindrances to it. When Depeche is put before Mode to make the name of a band, it doesn’t matter so much that it is difficult to imagine a mode hurrying up. We know that the name signifies the members of a band, as well as the repertoire produced by that band, and this is definition enough. But the new poetry is not defined by anything. What’s more, Depeche Mode may be a pretty way of saying ‘hurried fashion.’ In any case, it’s poetic. Two Ghazals is not.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION II

A piece of work by John Thompson (1938-1976) characterizes the condition that the contemporary poet is in. That work is something called, Two Ghazals. Patrick Lane’s commentary on these twin poems reveals the miserable condition even more. Patrick Lane, it is useful to note, is an award-winning poet of the governor general’s rank. I hope to serve a moral purpose by volunteering some general remarks on the poems and their commentary; my purpose, to be precise, is to communicate something worthwhile and helpful about the condition of a postmodern poet. 

The only literary criticism that is worth something is the kind that passes judgment in order to distinguish quality from rubbish. I have listened to our state broadcaster, the CBC, on a regular basis for over twenty years. The CBC, through a variety of programs, invariably greets authors on its platform in a manner meant to signal that these authors and the books they write are beyond reproach. Our national newspaper—The Globe and Mail—exhibits the same flattering behavior in its reviews. A book, poem, or song that is placed above criticism by the medium that it is featured or reviewed on, however, is usually unworthy of respect.

           Two Ghazals

xiv

All night the moon is a lamp on a post;

things move from hooks to beautiful bodies. Drunk.

I think I hear the sound of my own grief:

I’m wrong: just someone playing the piano; just.

Bread of heaven.

In close.

In dark rooms I lose the sun:

what do I find?

Poetry: desire that remains desire. Love?

The poet: a cinder never quite burned out.

xvi

The barn roof bangs a tin wing in the wind;

 I’m quite mad: never see the sun; 

you like sad, sad songs that tell a story;

how far down on whiskey row am I?

 I believe in unspoken words, unseen gods:

where will I prove those? 

If I wash my hands will I disappear?

I’ll suck oil from Tobin’s steel and walnut.

 If one more damn fool talks to me about

sweetness and light...

I’m looking for the darkest place;

then, only then, I’ll raise my arm;

someone really must have socked it to you:

were the lips made to hold a pen or kiss?

If there were enough women I wouldn’t write poetry; 

if there were enough poetry

                        

(The Globe and Mail, June 10th, 2000.)

 

What is even that? On a speculative level, though on no other, a person with no time to redeem might spend a minute or so trying to make sense of a line or two of this while sitting in the corner of a coffee house reading a discarded section of a newspaper. I do know what the ‘sound of my own grief’ means, at least. It is the sound that a gullet makes when a gag is triggered by fake poetry. This fragmented mess of words, I contend, cannot bring pleasure to anyone who reads it. Some fancy people would say that they are regularly blessed by clutter like this. We shouldn’t believe them. For the sake of appearing wise in the eyes of pontifical trendsetters, many persons among us will twist their opinions into conformity with what is ugly. No amount of peer pressure should suffice to make the saner sort of humanity join that self-pretzeling community, however. What ingratiating critics really think about the dopey work they eulogize is usually ‘hiding in plain sight,’ as they say. For example, it is an oblique tribute to call the work of Henri Matisse ‘stripped and pared down,’ which is the kind of compliment that Matisse commonly receives from critics who profess to adore his paintings. His work is so arid and uninspiring that no more than ‘stripped and pared down’ can be said about it without lying. What does ‘stripped and pared down’ mean but emptied of meaning and beauty? Postmodern poetry is even emptier than the latter paintings of Matisse.        

Postmodern poetry structure is nothing else than lack of structure. It is borderless and it is not regulated by metrical beat. And it is utterly absurd. It is the worst of the worst of free verse.  Not all postmodern poets write as nonsensically as Mr. Thompson does, even while conforming to the visual anti-structure of postmodern poetry, which is frequently distinguished by lowercase letters and sentences that do not end in periods. A postmodern poet, even without structural components, can still say something that makes a bit of sense. Aural and visual patterns, however, do say something about the late model poet. He is sterile, spiritless, out of harmony, and borderless. Not only is he lost to truth and beauty, he does not search for either one, which aimlessness approximates what postmodernism means. This kind of poet is of the same family as liberal theorists; he is a direct descendent of that school. Liberal literary theory, morally considered, is literary theory according to anti-traditional libertines. The worst libertines, these days, are socialist ideologues, though sometimes the ‘socialist’ moniker is too embarrassing for them to openly profess. Libertine literary theory—that which practically all universities teach nowadays—is iconoclastic vis-à-vis truth, goodness, and beauty. I even read that today’s ‘literary theory aims at…a Newspeak,’ an assertion that shocked me as I read it. This opinion was by a man named Holcombe, whose work I have misplaced. The statement is obviously and certainly correct, for what is Newspeak? Newspeak is the official language of socialist Ingsoc (English Socialism) in George Orwell’s 1984. It is the use of politically acceptable speech—valueless speech that has been approved by the ruling party: muddling talking-point speech. Politicians perform it best. When asked prickly questions about policy or practices, they, as if by the press of a button, utter their memorized bullet points in android fashion. The perfection of Newspeak, though, is Duckspeak. “It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck” (George Orwell, 1984, pp. 138, 373, 382.) Duckspeak includes, but is not limited to, speaking or writing in a style that can best be described as educated blah blah blah—speech that, had she become a gender studies university professor, Charlie Brown’s teacher would have uttered. Leftist literary theory has spun offshoots that, like tentacles in a horror movie, reach out to strangle right thinking wherever it can be found. As these tentacles go about choking cogent thought, they continue down their dozens of intersecting corridors leading to nowhere and to no more purpose than mindless, endless quacking. From a book that I haven’t read and never will, this is what leftist literary theory sounds like: “To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity, a move which has been a part of cultural critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added burden of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 44.) Quack, quack, quack. But these theorists really believe that their words, on some level, though I do not know on what level, are both relevant and revealing. This is why, I suppose, whoever read this book highlighted the part that I just quoted. These faddish theorists and their fellow poets have gone deeper into black holes than Jules Verne’s twenty thousand leagues, and yet they profess to be able to see something. No matter what the latest literary theories are, and even if someone can be found who understands them, their poems will remain impenetrable everlastingly. What they think is deep, we know is dumb; what they say is lit, we see as dung. What they write is no more intelligible than the ‘Post-Modern Gibberish Essay Generator’ randomly spits out. Indeed, this generator (look it up on the internet) was created, I think, to show exactly that. Is this sentence from the gibberish generator not as educational as the sentence quoted above from Butler’s book? “If one examines dialectic libertarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept deconstructivist desituationism or conclude that the establishment is fundamentally unobtainable.” This (Judith Butler might as well have written it) is philosophical quackery. Crackpot poetry is its handicapped child. You have to understand the ‘background discourse’ in order to understand postmodern poetry, says a radio host on the CBC’s Radio Canada. The background discourse is high fashion gobbledygook, the kind of stuff that Judith Butler’s book contains.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION I

Except for the proverb, the poem is the writer’s most concise medium by which to convey a memorable message. When words are carefully chosen and perfectly framed, the hallmarks of elegance and poignancy appear, and the result is a poem, not of a passing moment, but even for posterity to praise. A poem reveals much more than the message that it is drafted to communicate. A poem reflects the spiritual condition of its author. This becomes increasingly evident as poetry decreases in purpose and becomes less and less meaningful than poetry was once wont to be.  The poet’s condition will be more obvious in one poem than in another, and most obvious in his work as a whole. While reading some postmodern poems, my understanding of all of this coalesced; and out of this confluence, the following article developed.   

When a fashionable author describes the process involved in composing his work, we are virtually guaranteed to hear the same spiel that we have heard dozens of other authors give. How does he produce his novel, his story, or his poem? He makes a lot of it up as he goes; his characters take on lives of their own; the end of his effort is unlike the finale that he had in mind when he started; and he likes it that way because writing is a learning experience. Then, when asked about the suddenness of his popularity, he responds by saying how ‘crazy’ it all has been. This process is partly the reason why what is written these days is so wretched and weak. No plan is prepared; or if there is a plan, it has not received enough attention through meditation; and therefore the work is destined to be injured in the womb before the project comes to term. Edgar Allan Poe did not produce his classics, apparently, except by composing them based on a blueprint. His theory on the composition of tales includes the following rule: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (Edgar Allan Poe, Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.) Novels and short stories have become, since the dawn of the 20th century, as poor as paupers; every reader of 19th century classics knows it; and one reason for the downgrade is because the idea of composing according to plan has been discarded. But if novels and stories are paupers, poems must be to paupers what maids are to millionaires. Poetry is now the skid row of literature when it should be sipping Chateau Margaux from the balcony of a chalet in the Alps. In his own words, here is how Poe wrote his famous poem, The Raven: “It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition.) If this approach is too inflexible, it is still far better than today’s unpremeditated doodling. 

Songs, too, are weak and wretched today. Often they have no more than ten lines of text, with two or three of them repeating for most of the song’s length. But they still bond together and they still have borders. Songs, more than poems, are still holding together because songs must have rhyme or rhythm in order to be sung and sold to an audience. To be successful, a song must convey a message that is not wholly vague. Current poetry is not hedged in by these requirements. No one buys poetry; so the poets don’t care. Today’s lauded poet (lauded by snobs, not the rest of us) is the one who writes poems without rhyme, rhythm, or reason. The songwriter reveals his spiritual condition in the message of his song; the poet reveals his by the scramble of words that his poems are made of—poems lacking sense and the essential elements of poetry. The successful poet, to a much greater degree than the successful songwriter, is successful because he is celebrated by connected persons in upper crust coteries and clubs. If he has a cult following, it is not because of his craft. It can’t be, because there is no craft. Without mainstream media props, there can be no success for the postmodern poet because people give even less time to postmodern poetry than they give to the sensible kind from the Victorian era.   

Writing thoughts down as they come is not entirely a bad idea as long as these thoughts are passed through a moral sieve, and as long as the words are made to associate with one another to convey a message that can be gotten to the bottom of. But the poet of our day does not sift his thoughts in a meaningful, much less moral, way; this is why his poem fails to transmit a certain meaning. He writes this way on purpose, though, and with a healthy brain, which is a scarier fact than if he wrote chaotically because of a pathological disease. He is a step down, even, from writing thoughts down as they come. He imagines weird word combinations, then takes these wild compounds and places them on paper in such a way as will block meaning from coming through to the reader. How do I know that our poets write in this way? How do I know what’s in the head of a poet? One has only to read their poems in order to know it. No Muse, except Satan on LSD, maybe, would seduce these poets to write as they do. It is on purpose that they write meaninglessly. It is not necessarily easy to do what they do. It involves some degree of mental effort. It takes more work to stitch a line or two of discrepant thoughts together than to write a line or two that comes naturally through one’s mind. It is easier to write, for example, ‘cow on green grass/west side of fence’ than something like ‘Himalayan anxiety/yellow cow, drink.’ Because this last example is made up of words that are knit together to bewilder, it takes more time and effort to write it than it takes to write a couple of natural lines of sense. But because it doesn’t need to associate with the rest of the poem like the lines of sense do, the rest of the poem is easier to write than it is to complete the sensible poem. If I were a second cousin to Margaret Atwood, and if I were audacious enough to solicit her and other cocktail-sipping snobs to consider some poems containing bewildering verse (supposing I had written some), and if I were at the same time dishonest enough to pretend to be an admirer of Sylvia Plath, Marcel Proust, and Susan Sontag, there is a chance, however slim, that I would be chosen to join the literary overlords in an ivory tower for a cocktail and a book deal; but if, during the meeting, I wasn’t careful enough to conceal my true self, and my conservative cows came home, I’d be tumbled out of the tower and my connections would be terminated. As long as a person claiming to be a poet is not a conservative, he could be praised as a lion of poetry for composing crazy verses. Whether he is accepted or not depends on his connections.  As long as a person isn’t writing normal, fathomable poetry; and as long as the meaning of his riddles cannot be unraveled, he has a chance. His determination to write the opaque word could be noted as the mark of a prodigy come of age: if he is accepted. Today’s poet is in a desperate condition, no matter how popular he is made out to be. The deadness of his word is the proof of it.

PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION IX

Most persons would not be ruffled in the slightest after reading a disquieting essay on the shabby state of songwriting among English-speaking citizens of the world. Distress signals of this kind, if they are read at all, are drowned out by clamor and rage or unmindfully disregarded by a habit to remain unfazed. Our poor quality of communication, however, and our glorying in it, is a symptom of the moral cancer that threatens us with a denouement which is equal to—even greater than—the last bleak pages of Orwell’s dystopia. On a regular basis I read the most perspicacious books that I can find from the long past days of hoary yore. After several drafts of this essay were completed, I happened upon the following frightening passage from some time in advance of 1829. In a book called On the English Language, Past and Present, R. C. Trench, quoting a German scholar by the name of Friedrich Schlegel, bids us to notice a baleful signpost. Therefore, mark: “The care of the national language I consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it the object of his unceasing concern to preserve his language pure and entire; to speak it…in all its beauty and perfection…A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease to exist” (p. 13.) We have, in fact, become barbarous ‘in regard to everything else.’ That is how far we are en route to utter wreck. Our barbarities are numerous. In this article we have witnessed the wretched condition of songwriting by a close look at one pop band, taken for example. But witness our loss of manners and respect, or the declining elegance in cars, architecture, and even telephones. Witness this person walking down your street, holding what looks like a brick to his ear in order to talk with somebody. And then listen to him speak in the lame, stammering English of an outlander. This person, pitifully, is not a foreigner, but a citizen from birth, of Anglo-Saxon heritage, as white as Winston Churchill, and has a master’s degree in social work. He is the average citizen of today: the decadent descendent of courtly kinsmen. Even some 19th century milkmaids and plowboys had a better grasp of the English language than 21st century educators do. If the reader thinks that ‘decadent’ denotes a positive hallmark, by the way, he suffers from the deterioration of which I speak. Not one of us is exempt. To some extent, we are all affected by illiteracy, even if we read above the level of our culture; this is the case because we must, with regularity, come into contact with simple-minded men in order to keep up with what’s going on. I would say ‘simple-minded women’ as well; but that would be sexist when my object is to be generic. We are born in sin, which is enough to damn us; and we are brought up to be less than civil, which at least coincides with the heathen’s way to perdition. I have sometimes observed that a fairly recent immigrant, fresh from the tutor, is more seamless and fluent in conversation than is a Clarke or a Grant. What must this person’s reckoning of us be? Our manner of speech and our written word have become so impaired that even what Thackeray calls ‘fashionable slipshod’ might be desired instead, so long as the slipshod could be discerned. Whatever we do, we must strive to make sense—to toil at tying our thoughts and verses together in order to bring them to a plain termination. And what if I say that in addition to this, we must convey knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, and that to do this we must not only know our times but also know how these times are judged by the word of God? We are a long way, folks, from doing any good through what we say, sing, or write. “Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD understand all” (Proverbs 28.5.)                   

Now, to finish I will zero in on what matters the most. In his song called Wheat Kings, Gord Downie sings about a ‘weathervane Jesus’ being pushed by ‘rusty breezes.’ That’s one of the catchiest lines in his whole repertoire, though I don’t believe in the writing or singing of it. The sound of the song is warm and tender; but to depict Jesus as being turned this way or that by a breeze is blasphemous, unless the statement is qualified by an overruling, interpretative remark, which it is not. To the author, ‘weathervane Jesus’ is nothing but the right sound and feel for a part of a song; and this is the kind of thing the word of God condemns in its command to not take his name in vain. The way we react to how Jesus is treated is a mark by which to assess the validity of our profession of faith. What we believe concerning Jesus, and how we live because of our trust in his person, life, and sacrifice, is the weathervane pointing us, either to a miserable hell, or else to felicity in heaven. The rusty breezes of this world point us in the wrong direction. Gord Downie’s music is one such rusty breeze.