The Promised Land Project: Death and Poetry

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Death and Poetry

In previous blogs, I'd noted how Whitman's vision becomes eclipsed by the realities of the modern era. While Whitman's vision exalts the average working man and woman, subsequent poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot exalt art. When Pound decries what he decribes as emotional slither in poetry, such a position is rooted in the misanthropic and perhaps the modernist notion of detached reason. But people are emotional beings and yes, from time to time, we can get rather slithery about it. When it finds its way into our poetry, it's apt to look maudlin, such as what you might find in a sympathy card.

Another writer of about the same time with the strain of misanthropic, Evelyn Waugh, wrote a book called The Loved One about death in southern California. The book is hilarious, witty and wickedly funny, about a mortuary that molds a smile on the corpse of "the loved one" to help ease the sadness in the final viewing. Having grown up in southern California, Waugh satirizes the superficialities and the crass commercialism of the region that we can recognize to this day.

Yet the inherent sadness is that it's the traditional role of the poet to use their genius toward poetry that weaves the suffering caused by a death -- our shared individual destiny -- into love, not to mock it, and not to create art that comes across as sterile. The fear of death can become acute absent the gifts of the poet and lends itself to the courting of flimsy religious doctrine that talks about love but enables a society stuck in the self, instilling mere belief without a deeper sense of faith.