“I don’t think anything has done more damage to poetry than the sense that the form, itself, is divine, and that you’re an intellectual peon if you don’t get it.”

More here.

I just retweeted this quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates and I asked myself, why do I love these grumpy-ass anti-poetry sentiments?  Then I thought, as if to reassure myself, it’s not so much about being anti-poetry as anti-poet, or anti-some-poets.

I go back and forth and contradict myself on the whether-poetry-is-divine debate. In the last couple of years, I have fallen squarely into the Team Not Divine camp. Poetry may be an expression of the divine, but there’s a big difference between channeling high speech or glossolalia or the introduction of unacknowledged legislation into the publish sphere and making the act of, or the actor herself, divine, or expression of anything other than language. Poetry comprises words, speech acts, sounds, symbols. They all matter. It’s all we have. To express wonder and speculate how those words affect us in different ways, direct and ambiguous, is a noble enterprise.

I cherry-picked Coates’s quote out of context and am twisting it to serve my purpose. He’s calling out a writer on a conservative website and his take on the fake-controversy over Common’s appearance at the White House. This guy says that Common’s lyrics suck and are not poetry. The whole lyrics-as-poetry subject is a fool’s errand, of course, and the debate turned desiccated decades ago. Coates says that poetry shouldn’t be regarded as anything other than another, equal branch of the arts. That’s seems sort of obvious, too.

Here is Adrienne Rich barking up a similar tree:

Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.

What irks me is the notion of the poet-as-god or messenger-from-on-high. Coates isn’t really saying that and neither is Rich, but I am. Audiences and readers have long ago abandoned that notion, and more recently turned to other arts and languages to get their expressions of the divine. It’s been poets, mostly, who have conflated the practice of poetry and being a poet when it comes to divine power and the possession of it.

I use the term divine broadly. I don’t think poets are prophets or should-be politicians or a community more on high than others. I used to think that, and so maybe I have the passion of the newly converted. What I found is making poets gods unnecessarily and unhelpfully inflates what being a poet really means, and poetry, the poems, suffered.

I recently read a review of an anthology of poetry and the environment, and it reminded me of how poets disengage by engaging an alternative universe of their own making, and how very useless that has become, and how that is one more reason poetry has receded from the public ear. Modernism and New Criticism and MFAs and the retreat to the Academy have nothing on the recent–let’s say forty years–self-deification of poets. If trombonists walked the earth saying they held the secret to our energy problems and my country’s penchant for interventionism, said trombonists would be regarded as kinda crazy. We might even be driven to not listen to trombone music anymore, or ignore it.