From Winamop.com

Desert Writer, Poet
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

 

There are many sorts of deserts; deserts beyond ourselves, deserts within ourselves, and deserts crafted between nature and ourselves. Poetry constitutes one such desert.

Whereas the wilderness of poetry is a region that contemporary culture has largely terraformed, it remains, nonetheless, a transfiguring and baffling province. Sure, our society proffers nonfiction books, like biographies about T.E. Lawrence, and fictitious accounts, like the legend Hidalgo, for mapping out routes through the verities of sand’s influence upon humanity and of humanity’s influence upon sand, but those standards provide unsatisfactory perspectives on passionate writings’ hidden wilds. We need additional illumination of the harsh genre that is poetry if our prosody is to retain mastery of form, of style, and of technique.

Consider that within this abandoned ecosphere, in general, people become acquainted with barrenness as an emotional district from which effuses both vitality and mortality. More specifically, in most cases, people encounter poetry as desert winds, from harmattans to simooms, which chase away local precipitation. They encounter poetry as desert birds, especially nectar eaters, both the iridescent males and the drab females, which frequent window boxes, conveying the music of hot days and of cold nights. They encounter poetry as the united forces of light and of drip irrigation and as the resulting profusion of produce that those elements afford. They encounter poetry, too, as the plague of international conflict.

Although powerful dangers hide in poetry’s hills and sand dunes, and although poetry culls flora and fauna equipped with horns and sharp teeth, folks feel summoned, anyway, to inhabit poetic scripts. The greatest fragments of fire, after all, are buried in the most silent places. Neither the extreme of white picket fences nor of urban grit, what’s more, is suitable for determining poetry’s epistemology of eventualities, those prospects that are sometimes hostile, always mysterious. Poetry’s geography calls for new and different prowesses than those found among and regarding ordinary pages.

Settlers, who attempt to transverse poetry’s intellectually scorched, spaces, where beauty and hardship get adulated in tandem, thus, require fresh maps. The punitive nature of lyric necessarily demands that we provide it with unsullied likenesses and untarnished guidance. Literature’s most challenging clime mandates that we writers yield more, not fewer, revelations about it.

In years to come, few parties will want to or will be able to pull up URLs of “scientific” or of “political” findings on the rhythmic quality of language. Yet, during that same span, many people will still manifest interest in the memoirs of poets and in global collections of verse. Our literary desert will long impact us.

Consequently, we can’t leave poetry to the media, either mass or convergent; they’ve inadequate tools for defining our back country. Rather, our voices, those of us writers, must be brought into being to insure that polities’ permanent references to our desolate, bookish abode are veritable ones. It is up to us to generate copy. We are the individuals tasked to reveal, through and about cantos and stanzas, the human race’s intimate experiences, including the certainties that: childbirth hurts incredibly, yet is necessary for continuity, the soldiers who populate rough country skirmishes are often our own sons, rainwater is no mascot of NGOs, but a requirement for everyone’s survival, and where there is heat, there can be healing.

We writers need to persist on documenting the profundities of literature’s most inhospitable locale. We need to add our parental voices, our spouse-type tongues, our wisdom of poverty, and our sagacity formed from our gift of imagination art, to the surfeit of cold, statistical information on the allegedly austere regions of “narrative” and as “vignette.” Our writer eyes and stomachs can give life to our contemplative sandbanks. Our writer estrogen or testosterone can bring palpable texture to our civilization’s otherwise flat and flaccid accounts.

To be part of that industry, to annotate life as verse, to champion the creative community’s ongoing effort to include and to emphasize poetic texts, to once more make trendy the least populated realm of esteemed folios, we need to pioneer alternative records of texts, and we need to be willing to forge unconventional texts. We need to fashion manuscripts that reflect our unprotected surfaces as well manuscripts that expose our denuded resources. We need to write about that position, where corroborated liquid endures as a luxury, and where artistic “tribal” conflicts remain a fact. We need to dwell in the desert known as “poetry.”


 

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