Key West The Newspaper

by Kirby Congdon…….

The subjects for a poem are a matter of personal taste. Each person’s experiences are individual ones. After the preeminent subjects of love and death almost everyone is drawn to nature. This is usually in a domesticated version as in flowers, pets, or an immediate locale. Even in 1816 Keats’ cricket is hunkering down by the stove while a hundred years later Robert Frost is reflecting on rural New England lanes. We tend to come back now-a-days to more personal experiences when the obligations of city life or the world of business influence us. We had casual distractions in ballads, lyrics and historical treatments like Longfellow’s Hiawatha. But the industrial revolution and office life brought out the talents of Ogden Nash, Don Marquis or Dorothy Parker after World War I. A new generation’s lives were interrupted again for World War II for several more years.

Poetry extended its practice beyond conservative tastes. The resulting literary revolution has had a permanent impact. Poetry is no longer confined to the approval of the intellectuals. The boundaries were broken. Inspiration became revelation. Experience became a matter of public exposure and public commitment in coffee houses, bars and public parks. One poet whom this writer knew dismissed grammar, spelling, syntax and even approval for the need we all have for feeling a sense of worth on his own grounds. This was presumptuous but it worked bringing many people to the medium of poetry. This was Jack Micheline whose evangelism was a convincing persuasion for the acceptance of life for itself. We had had nothing like it except possibly for Vachel Lindsay (1879 – 1931). Jack’s influence was not for those who needed more depth in their purview but, like Gregory Corso, he offered a simplistic story that was almost political in its message.

The astonishing thing was that in America the grass roots themselves were using poetry to communicate. We could interpret them, discuss them or follow them in any way we wanted to, but we were obliged to see what was happening for the first time in a world of communication that we had not known before, anticipating inventions beyond our imagination. All of us saw complexity become more universal as well as more demanding from the dial telephone on through to television and the industry of recorded music. Even the established poets let loose with more complex tomes published by Robert Lowell or Wallace Stevens. Their work was explicated, competing with James Joyce or Proust as being significant writers while Arthur Rimbaud spoke to the avant garde in America from a distance. The new wave in San Francisco and in the Village felt more sure of themselves and began to recognize their own worth.

The world of nature was now beginning to take on large dimensions with sociological overtones. This expanded view, with so many customs, rites and organizations under question, became more conscious of consciousness itself. Like John Donnelly, we asked more pertinently, who are we? How do we identify ourselves? The familiar maps of earth’s geography along with an awareness of its many people and civilizations were stretched into millenniums of the universe itself with our travel and enormous telescopes and, at the other end, microscopes. Where was the soul? Perhaps this is the largest subject for poetry. There is no room for the obsolete soul but meaning for us still requires some reference to the human as even animal life continues to reveal the astonishing. In so many ways psychologically as well as physically we are already familiar with that “fiction” of moving matter with our brain waves in our hospitals for prosthetic limbs.

The more simple and real that our fantasies become, the greater becomes the need to encompass it all in poetry. Our consciousness wants something to rely on but the complexity of this existence is too much to comprehend except for the insight that poetry may provide. How this is done is uncertain and it is certainty we look for on any level, whether it is time, place or our own existence in this odd situation of being alive or, as one professional philosopher succinctly called it, the human dilemma.