by Perry Hotter

Created on: July 28, 2007

As one who has indulged in this noble and ancient art, I would love to give a decisive and resounding yes to this question, and even though Nietzsche stated that "Art is more important than truth," I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with the latter: the truth is that poetry is an art form, and no art form will be significant in the 21st century, except art forms that can be directly bled by the technical world, and integrated into it in a fashion that promotes the ideology of history as technical progress.

Surely most, if not all people, whether they be just spiritual or monotheistic-ally inclined, would assert religion (or spirituality) has an infinitely greater importance to them than any art form. Yet note, that in today's "mega-church " environment (mega-Churches themselves form for economic survival), many churches have become more like complex social services with everything from singles groups to political activities. They help people function in the increasingly disorienting milieu of accelerating technical change where no decade is like its predecessor, by maintaining some facade of a place with integrity and transcendence above the fray. Sure Jesus Christ is invoked; but what of it? I see, and continue to see for the future, a tediously moralistic view where the church continues to come down on every issue from stem cells to poverty in very narrow, "black and white" terms. In other words, it has followed to the letter the same divisiveness and buzz-word simplicity of todays media-centric political battles. Certainly people continue to be saved, but the devil is more than happy to let salvation become another "personal improvement" line.

Why this prolonged interjection about the decrepit state of our spiritual world? Because poetry is first and foremost a testament of man's spirit; most of the great spiritual truths have come to us in the form of poetry: from the Upanishads to the Suwar (plural of Sura). Mr. Dylan, "the voice of a generation," was named after a famous poet, and two of the greatest European voices to stand against the dangers of the collectivized spirit, were Miloscz and Herbert, both members of that most Catholic of nations Poland (technically Miloscz is Lithuanian). Even the declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg address are suffused with beautiful poetry that has echoed the cry of freedom and dignity for different generations of humans,yet...

Ours is a deeply quantitative society: our children's school performance increasingly relies on testing MEASURES; the sports that we watch is overwhelmed by statistics from salaries to RBIs;the entire economy dances and sways to the Federal Reserves interest rate pronouncement; nothing escapes number, from the amount of genes we have mapped, to the amount of marriages we are likely to have. A society as complex as this, while not being able to eliminate subjectivity altogether, has rendered it an epiphenomenon of the sidelines of the numeric Zeitgeist, because increasing efficiency means ever greater slavery to a clock which is the faceless icon and metaphor of quantity itself.

The century will be thick with upheavals, predictions dashed and, hopefully, the worst cataclysms averted. Poetry will survive as it always have: within the souls of those whose gardens are tended not by the corporate reaper, but by the hoe of individual conscience and sensitivities, which in this global wonderland requiring increasing standardization for cross cultural efficiency, will make it a shadow of a former world whose caster has melded with the boots...

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