TO BE A POET IS A CONDITION RATHER THAN A PROFESSION. Robert Graves’ words read to me as if there is a spectrum on which we’re all on: those who are ill, as it were, in their passion or focus, to those who focus on their means to make their wealth. Did anyone ever get rich on writing poetry? Come to think of it, what’s this title ‘poet’ really all about? Isn’t it just a self-proclaimed name someone towards the ill end of the spectrum gives themself for the purpose of being something? How many of us wrote reams of teenage angst bad poetry (or maybe still do)? We give ourselves a title such as ‘poet’ in attempt to mend, to think well of, ourselves. Oscar Wilde noted that ‘all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling’. Perhaps the condition of being ‘poet’ is all a defence mechanism, a ruse, an acceptable mask to show others, beneath which bubbles up all the mess of genuine feeling. No-one wants all that messy, uncoordinated inner self haphazardly splashed out to the world without a mask to give it acceptability, do they?
Is this all just a little too unkind to the poor poet though? Perhaps, as Graves had it, this condition is just not something that’s under the poet’s control. Many a writer knows that when words just suddenly come, they come. The writer had better have a good memory when this strikes whilst out and about: or at least they should carry a notebook and pencil. Being open to words could be akin to being susceptible to lightning strikes, or prone to instances of magnetism. However, just as spiritualists are often lambasted for a lack of true magnetism to the spirit world, for want of a better phrase, a poet could be perceived as hiding behind a claim to a condition. If a poet is ill, truly, they truly should be ill with words.
The faux poet is easy to spot: after all, as Graves also noted, ‘poets don’t have an audience; they’re talking to a single person all the time.’ All that bad poetry from genuine feeling manifests into a reel of one person trying to communicate with one other. The world might be awash with bad poetry, if all the paper thin stuff were pulled from drawers and printed from hard drives and laid out on the Earth. Does the self-proclaimed poet have to cover their tracks, embarrassed by the spew that has fallen around them, calling themselves ‘poet’ to offer mitigating circumstances? Poetry should be more than the stuff of such a carpeting of the Earth, surely. Shouldn’t poetry truly strike out, sing, envelope an army rather than an individual?
Perhaps the major percentage of poetry written can never truly envelope the masses: perhaps the majority of words are just written to offer a small wave: hello, I’m someone, a poet actually. Does the truly great poetry transcend these moments of mask-wearing? (I use the analogy of the mask because it’s a good way of explaining the concept of ego – defence mechanism in Freudian thinking: we construct an ego as an acceptable mask to show the world). The truly great poem may not need a mask to be something in the world. Sure, there are poems that are carried along on the ego that is the name of a famous poet, but maybe even these poems are not truly great because of just this fact. The truly great poem must be a thing in its own right: beyond the writer, their mask, their need to say hello – in a small voice – to the world.
Whether the poet is afflicted by an uncontrollable condition or they’re really just speaking to a small audience in order to be something in the world may, in the end, amount to little: poetry is really not about the poet at all. It’s all about the poem. The poem, you see, is the thing that is something in the world. It is what shines, or should shine, sings, captures and enraptures. It is, or should be, what matters. Leave your egos, masks and claimed conditions at the door.
– Dean Cody Cassady
