The grateful disharmony of poets
In the Sunday mailbox . . .
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future. . .poetry, by its very nature, is atemporal. . . . Usually the author is a part of the system of tacit but imperative prohibitions that forms the code of the utterable in every age and society. Nevertheless, not infrequently, and almost always in spite of themselves, writers violate that code and say what cannot be said, what they and they alone must say. Through their voices speaks the other voice: the condemned voice, the true voice. – Octavio Paz
The “tacit but imperative prohibitions” that condemn the voice are maintained by editors – the gatekeepers of the social order – and consequently by conditioned readers. Yet, Paz notes of work that manages to find publication:
A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them there would be no work. The text transcends its own history only by being assessed within the context of a different history. – Octavio Paz
We are living in one such “different history.” The technology of the internet has made it possible for marginal artists to survive their marginalization. Although there is a cacaphony of voices clamoring to be heard/seen, still the principle of “1000 fans” has and continues to make a difference in the lives of creatives and those who seek them.
Speaking of disruptive writers:
Today is the 104th anniversary of the birth of novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918). Arrested and deported after The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973. He wrote: "For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
It is the 83rd birthday of novelist Thomas McGuane, born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939);
and my hero, poet and novelist Jim Harrison was born on this date in Grayling, Michigan (1937). He died in 2016 shortly after my own birthday celebration that year.