Why Has Everyone Become A Poet?

Allow me the ironic licence of putting the matter somewhat provocatively : the reason why we have all become poets today is because we are afraid of negotiating the intractable territories of history, and instead turn to Poetry as our last line of defence from behind which we nervously peer at the estranged world outside us with a bemused and somewhat perplexed curiosity. Now that we have debarred ourselves from using outlawed terms such as 'judgement', 'truth', 'meaning', and 'objectivity', and have forced ourselves to become de-centred and dis-continuous subjects, we are compelled to run away from the realm of history and console ourselves with endlessly playing with our slipping and sliding words that must be perennially deferred. Consequently, Poetry is no longer about the real world 'out there' (for we have declared at the last Party meeting that there can be no such entity) and has degenerated into a sophisticated form of narcissism to amuse ourselves and an anodyne activity to fill in our unbearable moments of ennui.

Poetry intervenes at such a critical moment to redeem us : in the rarified atmosphere of Poetry we find ourselves blessed with a consecrated medium through which we can 'bracket out' the troublesome external world as an unnecessary irritant and discard it to the dustheap of history. Through Poetry, we can give vent to our modish suspicion of all belief-systems or patterns of political praxes that claim to analyse and transform the social structures within which we are all implicated. Instead, Poetry becomes a way of affirming our apotheosis of spontaneity, fluidity, arbitrariness, vacuity, and depthlessness, and of expressing our vitriolic denunciation of any attempt to discover a stable reality that may underlie these playful activities.

In other words, under the hallowed aegis of Poetry, we can retreat into ourselves with consciences free from guilt, and take shelter in a domain from which nothing can dislodge us or ruffle us in our placid equanimity as we ceaselessly pour out word after word after word after word in listless chains of meaninglessness. We have all become poets today but our Poetry is formally empty; it speaks no longer of the blood and the sweat of those who labour under the sun in the heat and the dust so that we, the privileged miniscule few, may have the time and the leisure to pour out our poesies in a never-ending stream; it cannot even say anything meaningful to those who really need it; it has become but an extension of our pastoral tea-party game of dissolving the world and it ultimately dissolves itself in the process; it is our feckless justification of our 'individuality', our final enclave of uniqueness against the anynomous hordes of the uncouth barbarians out there; and yet it flounders helplessly in the face of the chaotic reality of history from which it becomes progressively more and more disengaged every passing day.

Thus with the help of Poetry we run away from the harshness and the savageries of history into the impenetrable citadel of the 'I', and naively pretend that there will be less starvation, hunger, ethnic conflict, patriarchal oppression, and colonialism if only we could make better and more civilised human beings out of ourselves simply by taking a crash-course in how to write Poetry, how to analyse the poems of an eighteenth-century sonnetist, or how to swim along with the logorrhoea of a contemporary Master. In this manner, Poetry has become the supreme anaesthetic for the imperturbable minds and hearts of an entire generation for whom Poetry is merely a stylish mode of celebrating one's originality or one's ingenuity in coining neologisms that will be forgotten, in any case, after two weeks. Consequently, our Poetry has nothing to say about the brute realities of gender discrimination, wage inequalities, multinational capitalism, racism, genocide, and neo-imperialism, for we have allowed ourselves to be comforted by the illusion that Poetry dwells in some timeless ethereal zone above the earth, occasionally landing on it but never quite staying on long enough to suffer with the voiceless, the speechless, and the nameless.

Thus Poetry, having lost the tenacity to challenge the oppressiveness of the socio-political contexts within which we live, has instead become a symptom of our failure of nerve in the midst of the ambiguities, the complexities, and the conflicts of history, and a mute reminder of our obsessive preoccupation with our words, and ultimately with ourselves.