Writing at White Heat

On fire, you are, sometimes, writing at white heat, the poems flowing out of you as fast as your pen can fly across the canvas. Your mind feels illuminated, as though your entire being, body and soul, had got light, had burst into flames, spontaneously combusted. Fire is creative as well as destructive: it is the life-force, the energy of life.

You feel exalted, you feel inspired, you feel possessed. If you are naturally depressive, this is what feeling manic must be like. An unstoppable force of nature wants to splay out through your hands.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote The Sonnets to Orpheus at white heat, in February 1922, after a long poetic silence. He interrupted his completion of The Duino Elegies to write the Sonnets, completing both books very quickly. Rilke, in a letter after the writing, called it his "great giving." He felt he had been given all these poems, so quickly, and that he flowed with the process till it completed itself. Very few of the Sonnets or the Elegies needed any editorial correction, afterwards; they are available for us now as they arrived.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

An extraordinary and accurate statement. The creative act is often a receptive one. Not passive, but receptive. You have to listen for what's been given, and notate as it's given. There is no act of assertive will involved, unless it is merely to hold oneself open, to be vigilant antenna. That can take an effort.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying. . . .
—Rainer Maria Rilke, the opening phrases of The First Duino Elegy (trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

Rilke felt exalted by the great giving, and he wrote letters to friends and lovers soon after about the experience. He wrote, in part, to the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe on 11 February 1922:

All in a few days, it was an unspeakable storm, a tornado of the spirit (as in Duino), the very fibres and tissues cracked in me—there was never a thought of eating, God knows what nourished me.
    But now it is done.     Done.
      Amen.

So here is the triumph i was holding out for, through everything. Through everything. This was what I wanted. Just this and nothing more. . . .

When Jelalladin Rumi met Shams i Tabriz in the public square, Rumi had been a respected scholar, a book-reader and writer; he was known to be an intellectual power among scholars of Islam. When he met Shams, Rumi was knocked off his feet. One story tells of how he dropped all the books he was carrying into the fountain beside him, and swooned—drowning his books, as Prospero does at the end of The Tempest, an act symbolic of passing beyond book-learning into some larger universe. Rumi and Shams spent a great deal of time together, inseparable, aglow from within in each other's company. It was when Shams was taken from him that Rumi began his great outpouring of spontaneous song-poems, which were transcribed by his students as he composed them on the tongue, and later collected into books, notably the Masnavi.

O lovers, lovers it is time
to set out from the world.

I hear a drum in my soul's ear
coming from the depths of the stars.

Our camel driver is at work;
the caravan is being readied.

He asks that we forgive him
for the disturbance he has caused us,
He asks why we travelers are asleep.

Everywhere the murmur of departure;
the stars, like candles
thrust at us from behind blue veils,
and as if to make the invisible plain,
a wondrous people have come forth.
—Rumi, from the Divani Shams i Tabriz

For me, reading Rumi, even in translation, is like setting a moth next to a candle. I burn in his words. If I sit down and read Rumi for awhile, I almost always am moved to write a poem or two in response. I catch fire from his fire—is there a better definition of inspiration? Exaltation and ecstasy are meant to be shared, to explode outward, not to be private or locked up in cages.

laughing and crying
I throw myself from your cliff
into an abyss of dark fire

we go together to immolation
I give up nothing, having nothing to give up
you always held my hand

to come so close
and never marry you, wedding band that burns
timidness my failure

I’ve run from you for years
and never knew you so beautiful as you stand in flames—
yes yes and then forever burn me yes

I've written many others like this one; perhaps someday they'll be worth collecting into a book. They were all written at white heat. Some of them are just fragments, aphorisms, jottings; a few seem to be real poems. Nothing at all in the same league as Rumi, even if inspired by sitting next to him for awhile.

You can feel when you're in the zone, when it happens. You can feel yourself burning inside, all set to burn the paper and pens up. You get hunches with great big knobs on them. You know exactly where you're supposed to be, and what you're supposed to do. You become immersed in the flow.

You can also think of this as the intense creative period that often follows an extended fallow period. There is a natural cycle to the way the creative forces move in us; although there are many individual variations, in timing, amplitude, and noise out there in the modulation sidebands.

The secret to surviving the fire is a refusal to try to tame it, or channel it, but rather to run into its arms and be immolated. Go deeper into it, grab that flailing firehose and do your best to aim it where it's supposed to go. It will buck in your hands, and it will take all your strength, some days, just to hold on. But hold on anyway, even if it knocks you off your feet.

Not everything you write at white heat is going to survive the cool assessing eye of your inner critic, later. (And make sure it is later. Don't kill the fire by turning to your critic too soon.) Survival means holding on to the live wire, ride the bucking mustang, hold on as best you can, surf the edge of the wave—till the ride's over and you come down again. And you will always come down again.

What I have learned from becoming aware of the zone, the fire, over several years of paying attention to its tides, is that it always comes back. You won't always be able to predict when or why. The trick is notice that you're in the zone, get on the wave, and ride it again. Then just let the firehose of creative force splatter the waters of life all over the walls and floor. You can clean up later.

When I'm at white heat, I produce ridiculous amounts of new material. A lot of first drafts, at these times, need very little re-working to become completed. Some music goes direct to recording. Some poems and essays shape themselves as they emerge, needing little revision. When I'm at white heat, I feel like nothing can stop it, not even me; in fact trying to stop it could strain something vital, so best not to risk it. It can be demanding, requiring that I drop everything else and get to it. It's not always convenient. But following its lead is rewarding beyond what I can convey. It's worth every burn.

Haiku, Personification, Zen, Translation, Now and Zen

More than one English-language haijin (someone who makes haiku) has felt themselves up against the wall. The wall is the Western belief that anthropomorphism and personification are fallacies, are fiction, are no-nos in poetry. They use Western literary-critical terms like pathetic fallacy (now there's a term designed to be a negative from the get-go) or Eliot's objective correlative. They talk about subject-object relations, which is a Western bias built on millennia of assumptions about the nature of reality: that the "I" of the ego is separate from the "thou" of the world, that we are separate from nature, that we are in fact as Descartes claimed, ghosts in the shell. But the best haiku are not snapshots, not metaphors, not bridges between the disembodied mind of the poet's language and hte untouchable putridness of the natural world—the best haiku are deeply embedded participations. They are unifications, not bridges; participations, not observations; whole embodied experiences, not words about disembodied theoretical experiences. If you don't fall into the poem, into the world of the poem, if you don't feel it in your own body, the poem is not finished. Some would still call that sort of embodiment a personification or pathetic fallacy, of course: how we love to cling to our postural habits and defenses.

I think this is a very Western-psychological way of looking at the topic, which can be useful, but has some limitations, and can become a wrong turn, if one is not careful. Critical terms such as pathetic fallacy don't really have exact correlations in Japanese thinking about poetics.

Rather than personification, I would say identification-with: the idea of becoming-one-with. I think we get closest to this when we talk about participation. Not subject/object relation, but as Harry Hay put it, subject-subject consciousness. No separation: not-other. Nothing, no-thing.

It seems to me that the best haiku have this sense of immediacy, of identification, of lack of separation in all ways. So, no participation, no subject/object, but oneness/mu. This is the very aspect of Zen that was infused into haiku by Basho and his students, and also by Issa. It's a state-of-being condition, not strictly a literary-critical philosophy, which could of course be included in state-of-being. (This is also in the area where Zen converges with Western mysticism, in realms of Unity. Think of Yeats: like a long-legged fly, his mind moves upon silence.)

The criticism has been made that R.H. Blyth, one of the earliest translators and introducers of haiku into English, was rather "too Zen" in his thinking, thus misleading a whole generation or two of American haijin, notably the Beats. The criticism has also been made that Basho was only a fake monk, and admitted so. Add to that, were they daily practices, there would be no haiku, because words (and concepts) are a form of separation that are to be dropped away when one studies true Zen; the assumption is that one would be so fully enlightened that the need for poetry about experience would cease.

Fake monk or no, which was actually a common trope in the shogunate era in Japan—safer to travel dressed as a monk than as a merchant, for example—Basho and Issa were both recognized as having captured the spirit of Zen by later Zen masters and teachers. The spirit of haiku, obviously, is what I am going after, and is what I think trumps "literary correctness," or any perceived lack of Zen credentials on the part of haijin. So, I think the issue of Basho's Zen credentials is not as important as the truth that he did embody Zen in his writings, at least some of the time, and has been recognized as doing so. Tie in the influence of Zen on calligraphy, an art not at all separate from literature in Eastern culture—nor is painting, for that matter—and the both/and oneness of literary/artistic/Zen production starts to come into focus. No separation there, either.

I don't agree that one who is enlightened would no longer use words, because that throws out the whole tradition of teaching, darshan, and training. (This gets at the difference between the Theravada-style arhat who attains personal enlightenment and checks out, in contrast to the Mahayana-style forms of Buddhism, including Zen, that include helping others along the path of enlightenment, as well as oneself. The Vow of the Bodhisattva, while not so integral to Zen as it is to other branches of Buddhism, is not repudiated.) Demanding that the enlightened remain silent would also throw out the Zen literary traditions of the enlightenment poem and the death-poem, both of which are doctrinally accepted, and have produced some lovely insights into Buddhist philosophy. (My all-time favorite Zen enlightenment poem: "Now that I'm enlightened, I'm just as miserable as ever.")

The argument for it being easier-said-than-done has merit only to a point, because in Zen, literary work, like everthing else, is incorporated into daily practice. The point of practice is to exist in the Zen mind, beginner's mind, continuously, throughout the day, doing ordinary things ("chop wood, carry water"), not only while doing formal zazen or sesshin, which are "specialized" activities that even some Zen masters say are "nothing special." So, easier-said-than-done is simply part of the practice, until, like everything else, it becomes infused with Zen, and is as easily said as done.

Literary practice was incorporated into Zen, of course, which is why we have any tradition of Zen-literature at all. No separation here, either: it's all Zen practice. Thus, we have lots of Zen in haiku, and haiku in Zen. Lay monks, fake monks, or no, many of the greatest of Japanese literary treasures fit under this umbrella. (I'm thinking or Ryokan and Ikkyu as well as Basho and Issa, all of whom donned monk's robes at various times, for whatever reasons.) So, the fake-monk argument doesn't really mean they never had any genuine enlightenment experiences. That's only a matter of lineage-recognized credentials, not the actual fact of lay practice.

The problem with literary analysis of Eastern literature by Western critics is that sometimes there are underlying assumptions about the nature of reality (which can be understood across cultures; I don't buy the solipsistic argument for untranslatability) that are not the same in both cultures. I think you can translate when you are aware and respectful of the cultural context, the underlying assumptions about reality that the poet's culture carries. I think it's possible to understand each other, although it might take insight, time, and work, to do so.

This is why I prefer Sam Hamill, Stephen Mitchell, and one or two others as translators of Basho, Issa, Buson, Ryokan, et al.: they are actual Zen practitioners: they "get it," because they have had the experience of doing Zen, which many academic/linguistic translators have not. The translation can get even deeper when the reader has the same experience, and can embody the poem in herself/himself. Another poet worth mentioning in this context is Jim Harrison, who has done "versions" of Zen poets, although he himself is not a Japanese scholar, but rather a long-sitting Zen practitioner.

And here we get into the age-old argument about translation itself: do we translate the exact letter of the poem, or the spirit of the poem, allowing it to breathe in the new language? I personally feel some of the more "precise" academic translators often miss the spirit of the haiku when they translate them, because they get bogged down in the trees, and miss the forest entirely. A comparison of several translations of Basho's famous frog haiku can be found here, along with a commentary. This comparison is revealing, as is the commentary, which is by Robert Aitken Roshi, a Zen master and poet in his own right.

I don't really have a problem with R.H. Blyth, either, because even though he can occasionally be a little self-consciously "literary" in his word-choices, he does get at the spirit of the thing. I never understood the criticism of Blyth being "too Zen" about haiku, as, after all, how can anyone be "too Zen" about haiku? It's sort of the whole point of it, ennit?

The point of identification, obviously, is for the reader to complete the haiku experience by embodying it, by being the cricket or apple blossom, rather than just reading about it and keeping that mental (illusory) separation. No separation between "subject" and "object" is what Harry Hay means by subject-subject consciousness, in part. Again, this has deep parallels in the Western mystical tradition, too.

I do not mean to imply that a translator must be a certified Language Scholar, or otherwise a native speaker of both languages, or some other form of language expert. I question that assumption. I think that is perhaps a bias from academic life that isn't real-world. As an former escaped academic myself (and also as someone who spent much of his childhood in Asia; I am familiar with Japanese and its complicated history of writing, too, though I am hardly a scholar), I recognize it when I see it; and I have to say, leaving academia myself, showed me definitively that the wide, wide world contains many more things then are ever dreamt of in ivory-tower seminars. Academia is about the life of the mind; the rest of the world includes the life of the senses, body, and soul.

So, certified language scholar or native speaker of both languages? Not only is that not necessary, but if that were the principle and only criterion for translation, then hardly anything would ever get translated—and we would all be literarily and culturally poorer for it.

Again, I find limited those many translators that get stuck in the trees—the linguistic details—and completely miss the forest—the experience of the poem, the experience that the poem conveys. Some languages are easier to translate between, that is not in dispute. But I can think of several examples where the translator was not fluent, or a language scholar, yet the translations are successful, acknowledged as such, and highly respected.

Coleman Barks' versions of Rumi, for example: Barks knows little or no Persian; he relies on a literal translation of the original, originally by language scholars such as John Moyne, who is credited as co-translator early on in Barks' books of Rumi translations, then Barks works to get his versions in English. I have heard native Arabic-speaking Sufi scholars opine that Barks has indeed achieved a successful translation of Rumi into English. So, perhaps he's the exception, but it's obviously not an impossibility.

In my own experience, the academic disciplines least likely to get hung up in the box-like mindset that ignores the forest for the trees are those like anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology, all of which I majored in, in grad school; I admit, that could be a bias based on my own experience. The other academic disciplines least likely to get mired in literalism were the performing arts and other creative arts; musicians, artists, dancers, etc., have managed to communicate both intent and content successfully for generations, without necessarily being able to converse eloquently over tea. There are, in other words, other levels of communication than literal speech: and this is where the spirit of the poem can get through, even if the translator is not a fluent speaker of both languages. Wabi-sabi is a philosophical aesthetic that arguably reached its deepest development in the Zen-influenced Japanese arts; but it's an idea that does turn up elsewhere, too.

As for being accused of being a cultural constructivist, I have always responded to essentialist arguments about literature with laughter. I have lived a significant percentage of my life in other cultures, on multiple continents, and speak more than one, or even three, languages. My experience has taught me two things I believe very strongly: 1. The human experience is the same everywhere, no matter how we talk about it; we all have more in common with each other than not. 2. The differences, that wonderful diversity, are what brings the spice to life, and are to be treasured. I firmly believe that different languages literally create different mindsets, ways of framing the universe, ways of looking at the universe; and that every language has one or two experiences that can be expressed in that language that are completely non-translatable.

So, I agree that knowing the language helps one attain the world-view of the poet to be translated. But I would never exclude the possibility that a poet-translator could, through intuition, common (poetic) worldview, or lucky insight, get the spirit of the poem correctly without being a language scholar. It seems to have happened often enough that one must include the possibility.

There continue to be arguments that haiku and its related forms are too often mistaken as Zen-related. I think this remains a Western bias, perhaps an attempt in the Western post-modern(ist) era to divorce form from content, inspiration from form. I think the argument misses the point, if it is an argument that prefers to only discuss the secular, non-spiritual aspects of poetic form. Such arguments are equally absurd when discussing Rumi, or other mystical poets, for example.

Zen is a state of being, not a list of ingredients. It's a mindset that you inhabit, not a checklist of points made that fit an established canon. That sort of checklist literary criticism is wrong-headed at all times. All the Zen masters say it comes back to experience, and being Zen rather than talking about it, or even making poems about it. How can anything be Zen-related too often? That's like saying there's too much air in here for us to be breathing properly.

Maybe what these critics are trying to say is that too much emphasis can be given to Zen as an influence on literature, on the literary practice of writing haiku, and on the arts in general. I can see where someone might want to emphasize the literary sources over the spiritual, and talk about gatherings of poets rather than gatherings of monks; but then, I turn to the idea of "ordinary people and monks and mystics" (cf. Marsha Sinetar's book of that name) and ask: What's the difference? And who cares? Why make it into a big deal, when life is all of a unified piece? I sometimes view these anti-Zen literary arguments as coming from the same motivations of arguments against any and all forms of superstition, where the root of the argument is the implicit viewpoint that only concrete, physical reality matters, and things of soul and spirit are too trivial to be mentioned. Obviously, I disagree with that viewpoint. (Nor am I alone. The whole of Traditional Chinese Medicine is based on an ecological view of the human body's energetic and physical systems, in contrast to the mechanistic paradigm presented in Western allopathic medicine. Is it a coincidence that many anti-Zen literary arguments seemed touched by the brush of Western mechanistic philosophy?)

I come back to Zen not because I think haiku is only and ever a Zen poetic form, although for many haiku writers it seems that it was, but because knowing about Zen can help one understand the Japanese arts in general, because there was a huge influence from Zen on all the arts in Japan, literature included. The question of impermanence and transience is part of all this, including wabi-sabi, the seasonal-referent words (kigo) in tanka and haiku indicated by images from nature, and the act of creation.

As an artist, writer, and musician, I use every bit of beginner's-mind training that I have absorbed over the last 30 plus years—whether it came directly from Zen, or from Sufism, or from my Native American teachers about sweatlodge and shamanism—to clear and quiet my mind, to access my inner self, open my heart, and set forth: before I ever set down a word, pick up my musical instruments, or take a photo, I do this sort of self-emptying meditation practice. I don't really care what people call it, or where they think it comes from; there are many rivers.

I know from experience that there are other poets and writers who work at their writing in similar ways to mine, although we appear to be a minority surrounded by rather more intellect-based poets; that's an ongoing clash of viewpoints that we could get into, or not. The proof of the process is in the quality of the poem as it stands—which of course means that many processes are valid, because many different kinds of poets write many different kinds of poems of similarly high quality. There are many rivers.

I don't think we can get away from talking about Zen in haiku simply because we can't get away from talking about the images of impermanence that appear in many, many haiku. Chicken or egg? Does it matter? Doubt it.

Visionary Poetry 14: Primary Technology

Eugene Peterson, a Christian theologian, has an interesting point to make about spirituality in poetry. He says, with regard to the Psalms: At the center of the whole enterprise of being human, prayers are the primary technology. Prayers are tools that God uses to work his will in our bodies and souls. Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in his work with us.

Does this not also describe poetry? Especially that poetry that takes us out of ourselves, that takes us towards transcendence, that which we have sometimes called visionary poetry?

The Psalms, like several other books of the Christian Bible (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, etc.), are considered wisdom literature. These books of the Bible are different from many of the other Biblical books. They are non-narrative, for the most part; or, their narratives frame essential discussions about the nature of God, and the relationships between humans and the Divine. They are books that describe rather than proscribe; unlike many of the Prophetic books of the Bible, which are stories in which a prophet appears to set the straying people back on course, the wisdom books contain more lists of questions than of law-giving. The wisdom books are full of complaint, and in many cases those complaints are not answered, directly or indirectly. The wisdom books are in many ways the most profound, most mystical books of the entire collection of gathered literatures that was compiled into what we know as the Bible. (Never confuse mysticism with the miraculous; there may be overlap, but miracles are time-bound into narrative, while mystical experience is always timeless.)

(Just to be clear about my own position here: although I have studied Christian theology extensively, I have not considered myself a Christian for a very long time. Furthermore, in my normal discourse I tend to avoid using the word "God" because it carries a great deal of baggage, and most people discuss "God" as though the person they were talking to meant the same thing by "God" as they did themselves, which in my experience is rarely true. I am unable to avoid using the word "God" here, though, because this is a discussion of spiritual and religious poetry; it's a necessary aspect of the discussion.)

The Wisdom Books are my favorite books of the Bible because in them the human voice is clearest and most honest, most plain. These are books that present the existential paradoxes of living without cloaking them in received wisdom or doctrine: in truth, the wisdom books ask a lot of very profound questions that they do not always answer. In them, you can hear human voices assert their personal and universal responses to life, love, and the divine—voices that seem very contemporary to us still, because they are timeless and their subjects are universal to the human experience—but what you don't hear very often is self-righteousness or overt judgmentalism. Even the Psalms attributed to King David—a complex, conflicted character in the Bible if ever there was one—are full of paradox and contradiction, which the author leaves in suspension, as a question: Why do you heap praise upon me yet steal away those I love? The wisdom literature is full of such complexities and paradoxes. These books bring into high relief the understanding of many mystics who have said that the Divine exists at the point of every paradox. That irreconcilable and difficult moment suspended without resolution between seeming opposites: that's where God lives, and is most closely available to us.

Poetry, if it is to be visionary, needs to be like the wisdom literature: It needs to be honest, it needs to be undogmatic and exploratory, it must be as heartfelt and simultaneously artful as possible. It must also express and contain paradox and complexity. Dogmatism and doctrine tend by contrast to be overly simplistic and sentimental. The wisdom books of the Bible take a hard look at life, and are not always soothing or pleasant. The paradox is often left unresolved—which is as it should be.

Peterson said: At the center of the whole enterprise of being human, prayers are the primary technology. Prayers are a primary technology. But prayers are also a kind of poetry. Genuine prayer fits many of the rules of poetry: concision, depth, intensity, layered complexity and resonant experience are all built in.

Perhaps this only applies to visionary poetry, but it seems to me that when a poem is praise (as Rilke says all poetry must be), then such praise is a kind of prayer.

When Pablo Neruda writes his Elementary Odes to ordinary things, or in the Ode to Broken Things, he exalts the everyday by making it special, illumined, sacred. Neruda's erotic poems are very prayerful in tone, as well as playful; they remind one of The Song of Songs in the wisdom literature.

There is also the tradition of songs to the Dark Lord, Krishna, by the 16th century mystical poet, Mirabai (or Meera). These are bhakti (devotional) poems, in which the God is praised both for his mercy and for the derangement he brings upon the poet. (As Rilke wrote in one of the Duino Elegies: Beauty is the beginning of terror.) He is a dark god, not only a happy god. Mirabai occasionally sounds like the author of the Psalms, in her simultaneous encapsulation of ecstasy and strife.

And then there's Rumi. At present the best-known Sufi poet to the West, although not the only one of greatness. Much has been discovered and written about Rumi for many years now, in the West. There are numerous translations and academic studies; numerous anthologies, and several translators. (The best translations into English are the separate works of Coleman Barks and Andrew Harvey.) So there's very little I need to add, except to continue to recommend that one read him. There is also in Rumi that seed of paradox, of contradiction, of the explosion of expectations into something genuinely original, truly poetic. I find, whenever I read Rumi, that I feel like taking up the pen, and responding with a poem or two of my own. That itself is a poetic response, and a prayer.

It's hard sometimes to separate out poetry from sacred literature, since so much sacred literature has been expressed as poetry. I think it's important to be very clear, however, that a lot of religious poetry is not at all spiritual: because it is rote, it is dogmatic, it is easy, and it offers answers to questions that were never asked. Far too much religious poetry is the poetry of witness. It is a statement of creed. All of which tends to bad art, because thoughtless, rote, and automatic. Recitation of dogma or creed is not creative; it is imitative.

The primary technology of prayer can be expressed poetically, as poetry, or in the form of poetry. Scripture is often poetic, because the language of metaphor and analogy gets closer to the heart than does analytical philosophical discourse. Poetry is the technology of faith, of knowing. Poetry is a primary (verbal) technology of recording vision. Poetry, like prayer, like shamanism, is spiritual technology. It needs to be recognized as such, and not locked up in the conceptual box of being only language. Language is the tool of prayer and of poetry alike.

Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book
nor from tongue.
If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is
illumination of heart.
—Rumi

Poets Need to Get Back to Basics

I've been reading a lot of poetry criticism lately that is basically backbiting, kvetching, mean and venal. It's time to get past all the infighting, the rivalries, the petty bickering about what and what isn't "Poetry," or good poetry, or even art. All the sourness sours on us, in time. Not to mention that certain targets for ire come in and out of fashion; this week the critics hate Kerouac, next week they'll dismiss someone else. The whole poetic field is demoralized, and complains incessantly about how the audience has abandoned poetry, real poetry, in favor of something less worthy and less "pure." There is a real despair, not just about the lack of a real audience, but about the whole mission and purpose and function of poetry: no-one seems to know why we do it anymore. There is a flailing for a lost center, several traditions that were thrown away without regret but now are missed, and there is a real yearning for some new tradition to adhere to—but no-one can adhere to any of the current offerings because they are suspicious of the motivations behind such projects.

There's a real truth to the comment I've heard more than once with regard to literary criticism: Perhaps the reason poets argue so much is precisely because there's so little at stake.

Enough. It's time to grow some lungs, folks.

It's time to return to poetry's first, best function, which is not criticism, but praise. Enough with the nay-saying, it's time to return to yay-saying. Tell me what turns you on about literature; you've certainly wasted enough ink telling us what turns you off. Try this, if you dare: for just one week, say nothing negative—see if you can manage that. It will more of a challenge for some poets than others, because thinking negative has become a habit for those poets, just like any other pattern of thinking that you practice too often.

Poetry is praise. Poetry is not denigration. Poetry builds up, it doesn't tear down. That's what satire does, and while satire can cloak itself in poetic means and techniques, it can never teach you to praise what you love. Poetry makes things new, even old things that seem to have died. Poetry needs a live breath in it, a living breath with which to in-spire it: inspiration means to breathe in. All the latest -isms and schools and manners in poetry have built-in sell-by dates, and so none of them last very long: they have expiration dates, but no inspiration. Poetry is not a competition, not even for the legacy of funding or grants; poetry needs to be confocal, and cohabit with everything else that is life-giving instead of life-denying. Poetry needs to remember its shamanic and magical and mythopoetic origins; poetry needs to remember that it used to be the language of sacred communication. No matter what you believe in, believe in something, or your poetry and your soul will become stale and stagnant.

Poetry is praise. No modern poet says this better than Rilke:

Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that,
and came to us like the ore from a stone's
silence. His mortal heart presses out
a deathless, inexhaustible wine.

Whenever he feels the god's paradigm grip
his throat, the voice does not die in his mouth.
All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape,
opened on the hills of his sensuous South.

Neither decay in the sepulchre of kings
nor any shadow that has falllen form the gods
can ever detract from his glorious praising.

For he is a herald who is with us always,
holding far into the doors of the dead,
a bowl with ripe fruit worthy of praise.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 7

And even in the shadows, praise. There is room in praising for the soul's dark night, for kenosis, for the emptying, the sinking and cooling into the void and the abyss. There is room for darkness, for the Shadow, because within the darkness is the seed of the light, just as within the light is the seed of darkness. At the heart of each lies the other, about to be manifest.

Only in the realm of Praising should Lament
walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain,
watching over the stream of our complaint,
that it be clear upon the very stone

that bears the arch of triumph and the alltar—
Look: around her shoulders dawns the bright
sense that she may be the youngest sister
among the deities hidden in our heart.

Joy knows, and Longing has accepted,—
only Lament still learns; upon her beads,
night after night, she counts the ancient curse.

Yet awkward as she is, she suddenly
lifts a constellation of our voice,
glittering, into the pure nocturnal sky.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 8

And poetry needs passion. Poetry needs passion instead being cerebral. Poetry needs the caring heart, now, more than it needs another school of intellectual constructivism. Poetry requires passion, as much as it requires breath.

This is what Rumi says about passion (translated by Andrew Harvey), and it is a poem you should print out and put up on your refrigerator, where you can read it every day:

Passion burns down every branch of exhaustion.
Passion is the supreme alchemical elixir, and renews all things.
No-one can grow exhausted when passion is born,
so don't sigh heavily, your brows bleak with boredom and cynicism and despair—
look for passion! passion! passion! passion!

Futile solutions deceive the force of passion.
They are banded to extort money through lies.
Marshy and stagnant water is no cure for thirst.
No matter how limpid and delicious it might look,
it will only stop and prevent you from looking for fresh rivers
that could feed and make flourish a hundred gardens,
just as each piece of false gold prevents you
from recognizing real gold and where to find it.

False gold will only cut your feet and bind your wings,
saying "I will remove your difficulties"
when in fact it is only dregs and defeat in the robes of victory.
So run, my friends, run fast and furious from all false solutions.
Let divine passion triumph, and rebirth you in yourself.