The Promised Land Project: National Poetry Month: Broadening Our View of 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.

Friday, April 8, 2011

National Poetry Month: Broadening Our View of Poetry

As I’ve addressed elsewhere on this blog, to enable poetry to help bring people together and heal the divisions that afflict our society, we begin by broadening our view of poetry. In Plato's Republic, Socrates cites an ancient argument, or difference, between poetry and philosophy (i.e., mythos and logos) that I submit continues to this day. While the modern era has exalted reason, or logos, the term myth has become generally synonymous as something that's dismissively untrue. A more accurate and working definition can be as follows: the stories a society tells about itself. The term narrative seems to be currently en vogue and is similarly used to describe how an individual or group sees itself in relation to the rest of the world body. Furthermore, the modern mindset often fails to differentiate between religion, an institution, and the mythos.

The creation myth of Adam and Eve and the subsequent initial books that make up the Bible, makes use of a collective narrative and to help bring people together, former slaves, to help solidify a people, the ancient nation of Israel. The narrative provides a shared history and addresses the shared human predicament of the fall into the dispiriting effects of self-concsiousness as Adam and Eve suddenly recognize they’re naked.

The poets of ancient Greece drew on myth to dramatize tragedy. Thus poetry was used to bring people together through a shared human capacity to suffer.