This is our last blog post covering questions about what poetry may be. We ran out of Elisa New questions (from the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC) in the last post. This question is a bonus question I cobbled together somewhere between reading about Gary Snyder and Jack Spicer last year, a question poised somewhere between the Confessional/Beat poets (who make appeals from the self) and the LANGUAGE poets (who try to reveal a reality which does not include ego-driven ideas of the self).

I find this a very interesting, advanced question: what is the purpose of poetry, to reveal the personality or to disclose the world as authentically as we can (in all its scary nebulousness), to explore our many personas or to abandon the idea of individuality altogether?

Poetry camps each feel very strongly about this. And, as you can predict, I hate to take sides in these poetry matters. Again, how can you choose? Like all these attempts to define what poetry is and what poetry does, there are easy cases to be made outside of any staid definition.

If we’re honest, most humans can’t really function outside of a sense of self, despite the precariousness of the self in any biological sense. Psychologists can show how and why we construct our ideas of ourselves so we can mentally move through the world. And we need the idea of other selves to help us come to terms with the mysteries of human behavior in others.

But some (very Zen) humans can also operate with a more fluid sense of self, of being part of a collective self (without feeling threatened by losing the assurance of an ego). Other people need a strong sense of self, a bolster that helps them understand where they begin and end in the world. And then some people just want to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

So this determines the kind of poetry each type of person needs to write.

It’s probably a healthy practice to try both kinds of consciousnesses and write poems that explore each point of view (or pointlessness of view).

After all, without personalities to communicate from and to why bother? On the other hand, with an intransigent sense of self, you are going to get stuck in the pointlessness of that as well. Without being willing to a kind of fluidity and openness to changing your mind, why try to communicate with others? Because if your goal is just to force your perspective on everybody else, you are doomed to fail and feel alienated as a result.