Poetry, like music, is movement. A movement of sound
and meaning. What we call form is the outward envelope
or shape of this movement, which carries the sound
and the meaning like a wave carries water.
In perception shaped by the current metaphysical and
cultural bias, both Music and Poetry are dominated by
the sense of sight. I visualize this as a very limited,
dark, bandwidth drawn about the eyes, almost like a pair
of blinders. This means, generally, that we as a culture
pay more attention to how the flow of sounds we call music
and poetry is written down, than how it actually sounds as
living movement.
Thinking of form as movement can be liberating, I think. One
of the many species of movement I’m keenly interested in is
a poetry with a longer, narrative, matter of fact, consistently
understated, composed of short phrases always articulated by
pauses of almost equal duration. It is a kind of movement I
first encountered in the work of the late Harold Pinter. For
me, it works with meaning which is too ugly, too brutal, too
appalling for words.
Too appalling for words. Yes. Like the current US
government’s enthusiastic use of drones.
In my view, anyone with any sense of history instantly
associates drones with the deadly V2 rockets developed by
Werner von Braun and built in the underground hell of
Penemunde. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow was the
first to focus on this theme in literature. But his self-
consciously overly complicated work evoked nothing like the
horror I experienced upon watching a Dutch documentary,
produced by the VPRO and Andere Tijden, which lets
survivors of the rocket hell-factories, also in a
remarkably point-of-fact, unemotional style, tell their
story.
Unlike Aristotle, I do not believe that war can ever be
justified. This is especially so in the current era. So
I do not believe in, nor do I wish to participate in, any
kind of glorification of it. At the same time, the instrument
of violence which is the drone takes the violent use of force
to a completely new level. It is the cowards instrument of
choice. What does he have to loose? Nothing. It is the
instrument of clean death so sought after in an age which
prefers not to get dirty. But from the compassionate angel’s
point of view, it is obvious that the US dominance in this
first chapter of easy-chair video-game warfare shall not
last for long. That is, if we citizens of the blue planet
of peace simply sit back as obsequious drones ourselves,
and allow it to continue. For higher still, I’m quite sure
goddess Nemesis will eventually restore balance and truth,
and call to account, as she always has, those who in their
hubris now terrorize the skies of lands they have never set
foot in, in lands they have never seen.
POME & PAGE at:
http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/night-stations2.html