We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Poetry giveth, and Poetry taketh away.
The Muse will no have more of this “hero
with a gun,” the hero as killer, will have no
more of Aristotle’s now empty sounding
assertion that ethical excellence and courage
can only be demonstrated on the battlefield.
No. The hero has become the one rarely seen,
sitting alone next to a pond in New England,
meditating on the ending of the slavery of
the Mind, of Nature, of one’s fellow Man. Or
one who walks in protest to make salt at the
sea in nothing but a loincloth and sandals, and
brings an entire Empire to its knees. Or the one
who transcends the racial violence of an Alabama
to be the voice of conscience for the whole world
that ends the brutal genocide of the American
Conflict in Vietnam. I say to you: that is the new
spirit of Poetry, of the new hero, of and for
our time.
AGAINST THE MTV-IZATION OF SOUND
The eye that stares,
blinds the ear;
The ear that must have image,
blinds the mind.
[Since about 1984, when MTV and music videos
came to dominate the popular commercial music scene,
I’ve always been suspicious of the rise of the added stream
of imagesto promote “songs,” or “tracks.”
We live in visual dominant — not visually literate — times,
meaning basically that are brains are knocked around
at random by a constant flood of trash.
This is bad enough for the extremely important, and powerful
as a formative force in our perception, visual environment.
But when it comes to sound and music, it is even
worse, in the sense of having a profound yet tacet
degenerative, arbitrarily limiting effect. If the natural
drama of the physical performance of music — one
of the most intricate and subtle of ballets — is not
enough, then I would say, something is very, very
wrong. Why? Well, must could be said, but just
let me say here, that it quicly becomes a cover
for the inner weakness of both the music
and the performer. It is not the stuff of a
new creative tradition, in my view, but just more
corporate corruption of culture.]