Among certain circles, it is the storyteller who we grant precedent to allow us passage through the tight and winding way of the wounded Human.
As someone who writes poetry and by certain treasured folk am considered to be a poet, I have asked myself what this means. How does this function? What is the poet to do?
Within internet entrepreneurial perspectives, content is king; Make your art and market it to the world. Perhaps this is akin to voting with our dollars or attention. If our art doesn't reach people, then is it providing value?
If poetry offers an animated reroute through the troubles, not a sidelining or bypassing of it, then this outlook suggests that one's poetry must garner an audience and appeal to those poetic sensibilities. Worlding this more beautiful way our hearts know is possible through market forces.
I see this as too heavily prioritising the individual. A poet is still a human and these humans are as liable to misread or mishear and subsequently miss speak. Change of the kind I vaguely speak to here is the opposite of neo-liberal economic rhetoric. This exchange trickles up. We do not find catalyses of change through a politician or a business person or any individual. Typically, they find it among the people and we demand their participation.
I wonder at the prestige of the notion which began this piece, that the poet is inherently a guide through troubles. As I will speak to later in this piece, a guide is the landscapes they take us through. These troubles, our times, solidify as our molten bodies meet the cooling threshold of decision.
In my experience, most poets utilise poetry for catharsis or for therapy. A worthwhile function of writing, though catharsis, is as easy as an orgasm or a cigarette or a rant. We take for granted our discomfort and, subsequently, the awkward nature of our woe. Now woe, in kind with many Human traits (perhaps all but we can leave that alone for now) is fluid in nature.
Yet these wounds are the landscape of our troubles. In post-Apartheid South Africa it was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducted by Desmond Tutu that articulates most beautifully and uncomfortably this way in and through. A political-religious ceremony for the victims of baasskap (boss-hood) culture to brew their troubles into a salve for the country. It was an invitation for the people's wounds to be seen, acting as a guide to their country folk through those territories of pain.
To know the story of how our culture does not cater our pain could be precisely the way into a compost of Humaning. These poet's therapy words are not that car we cant afford, or the holiday we won't take, or that accolade we might not achieve that these poets expressed. But their pain, their home life. Those things shut away from the every day in the kingdoms we are vassal over yet besieged each day we surely are. If being listened to allows one to be more fully present then perhaps a poet mediated Truth and Reconciliation Commission is in order. Where we would be dismantling these defensive artefacts, objects of ruinous modernity. Not to seek out the harshest of realities or to compare my gilded wounds with your own but to grieve and not to be dismissed for what this grief may be clothed in or the gait of its walk as it enters our front gates.
It is worth noting here the sophistication of Bayo Akomolafe's work The Wandering Winding Way Of The Wound, a series of topography rich conversations between Sophie Strand, Tyson Yunkaporta and Vanessa Andreotti with Science and Non-duality. These stories are more than personal, more than human and also singular and also domestic. If there is an event, the event splays out like shrapnel at first, piercing our futures and obscuring our present. They become mycorrhizal when tracing them back through time, as the Earth in us grows over the ravines gouged in our hearts.
So in what way does a poet attend this mass, voicing the cartographic milieu of that beautiful way? I think not through our own work, through a career as a poet, as an audience favourite. It is a functional request being heaped upon the poet and I believe it is closer to the oracular capacities of a prophet or of a channel that this function finds meaningful purpose. It is not the poet but poetry that guides us. The poet becomes a missionary to the troubled places, not to install a McDonald's of blueprinted dislocating monkhood. Instead, the poet carries an empty book and a working pen, for you and yours, them and theirs to write gospels of trauma and psalms of dis-ease. We become not the benefactors of sin, the inheritors of a missed mark but the journal entries logged in navigating the shifting topography of pain and loss.
Something to bear in mind here is that this kind of poet is likely not a cartographer but a translator of strange customs in strange lands to the explorers seeking after the gold of Kintsugi (golden repair)or a more living version, Shinkinsugi (fungal repair). There exists a dividing ravine as deep and as wide as that which exists between languages, between the map and the territory. A map is brought down upon land, territory rises from the Earth up to meet us. There is no telling what we will encounter, how it will affect us and where it will lead us after the fact, from cartographic generalisations.
Upon the land however, in the fields, among the stoney guardians of deep time, the poet might also act like the benefactors of chaos, dancing in the frayed old growth and opening niches of unforseeable activities. In The Mushroom At The End Of The World, Anna Tsing catalogues the many routes in and out of the strange beings living on the margins of capitalism and society, who forage for such a chaos dancer, the Matsutaki mushroom. After the Ghosts but before industry, it is Matsutaki who returned to Hiroshima after the dropping of Little Boy. In the soil eroded hill sides of post-nationalisation movements in Europe and North America, it is Matsutaki who make sense of this landscape along with members of the Pinus family.
How might the chaos dancing poet, fruiting in the post-modernity west, open niches of cultural and social activities, currently out of sight? What creative foods can be found by them among our ruins? The Matsutaki does not rant at the woes of their environment, it does not condemn loggers, it does not condone impositional reforestation efforts. Matsutaki play and invite the marginal, the dispossed, the strange and misshapen to play aswell. Culturally speaking, Matsutaki are prized in Japan for their relation emboldening capacities but for most in the west who do not know the mushroom, they see nothing. Would Chaos Dancing poets be the same? Would our poems greet the fleeing abiders of the way it is, whose way suddenly collapses, at the livley edge of cities and forests? But otherwise be drowned out by the whirring (that some call music) of overclocked red lining machines? If so, then it is already here. Much like the several generations of Matsutaki foragers, unnoticed by mainstream capitalism, chaos dancing poets too would simply have gone unnoticed by most. Rupi Kaur is not such a poet, she attends to the trends of the many.
So perhaps it is not that poets have not sung a song we can all dance in concert to, as Terence Mckenna suggested, but that those of us foraging for such a song haven't been scanning the gravel pits of the quarried and devastated landscapes. We haven't been inspecting our wounds and noticing the strange fruiting bodies of these uninvited but otherwise welcome arrivals. We keep expecting them to walk onto our stages, or for their work to greet us at the bookstore, or for their song to disrupt regular programming, on the regular programs. We might stumble over them but really, we are going to have to go looking with the trained eye of those who know how to track the debris fields of chaos, for the dancers playing in its opportunities.
Ryan Dickinson