The Promised Land Project: National Poetry Month: From Paper and Types to Bodies and Souls

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.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

National Poetry Month: From Paper and Types to Bodies and Souls

In the previous entry we engaged in an ancient argument between poetry and philosophy to examine the use of poetry to help bring people together. Here we move from the ancient era into the modern era.

In a time of division in our nation’s history, in the prelude to the Civil War, the poet Walt Whitman attempted to use poetry to help bring people together based on our shared human identity relative to our democratic society. The opening poem of the first 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass , later entitled, "Song of Myself" would help initiate a revolution in written poetry, that of free verse. Yet in the opening of the subsequent poem, it is as though the genius of Whitman looks back on the opening poem and its ecstatic assertions and already recognizes the limitations of poetry in written form:

This is unfinished business with me….how is it with you?
I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us.

I pass so poorly with paper and types….I must pass with the contact of bodies
and souls.

– from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition

About a century later, in his book, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller writes as follows:

It does not require paper and ink to create poetry or to disseminate it. Primitive peoples on the whole are poets of action, poets of life.

The two books cited above provide some background and influences towards a proposed movement in American poetry: poetry moving from paper and types to bodies souls, or from the written poetic to the living poetic. Such a movement is envisioned to revitalize all of the arts, including poetry in written form, as we renew poetry's historic calling to help bring people together and override our societal divisions and entrenched narrow interests.