by xe

Created on: March 22, 2009   Last Updated: March 27, 2009

NO - for Poets ask Society to think, and today we are far too self-absorbed for such honest introspection! Tis far better to ask "Do Poets Need Society"! As a poet, one chooses to verbalize one's innermost emotions and thoughts regarding a subject which has profoundly stirred our soul. Poetry is not a commercial endeavor. Poetry comes alive as breathing is life.

Society in its modern sense represents, to this wandering soul, an external and cacaphonic blur of voices which through the expression of each and every opinion screams nothing to anyone caring to listen. A poet who feels that they must be needed by the group of everyone which in reality means No One must surely be destined to a frustrating and lonely existence in a world filled with the excess of overwhelming nothingness.

The world of today, blanketed as it is by continuously thickening blankets of randomly scattered web-spray, provides anything one may desire in the way of consent, discord, criticism and honor. Society in this universe of everything-ness means - What? What is Society in this first decade of the newest millennium? Society is everything from the terrorist in Afghanistan with a Rocket Propelled Grenade targeting a schoolgirl to the Tibetan Monks living in peaceful harmony with one-ness.

Is my trendy coffee-shop my Society? Is surfing porn on the web your Society? The abandoned drug house in the city where heroin is sold, bought and enters the addicts vein from the HIV-infected needle is most certainly a Society! Do these wretched souls need a Poet?

Does the yuppie Mom who provides Gucci tennies so the six-year-old can impress at soccer need a Poet? I am hindered from comprehending the question as I lack an operational definition of the term "Society", it now appears. Certainly what we would hope was a Society in the historical sense is by definition Poetic in its basic tenet.

What we observe as Society today is in so many senses representative of everything that is as far removed from Poetic as is imaginable.

But, really, is that not then the essence of the true need for a Poet?

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