Monday, January 24, 2011
The Poet of Despair (poem by Dorothy)
The Poet of Despair
This one sees only the worst
of it,
the terror
and despair.
She is convinced
that all her things,
her flowers,
her body,
even the world at large--
are touched
by the arriving
night of destruction,
the no-ness of the approaching dark,
all life squelched
and shriveled,
beneath its spreading
shadow.
True, her facts
are unassailable,
all couched
in elegant words.
True, bad things can
happen to very good people,
our friends, our close ones,
ourselves even,
and we are all caught up
in unfoldings
we do not understand.
But to give way to universal
bleakness,
even for the making
of undeniably good
poems--
this is the pathway
down to consuming darkness,
the trail leading
to the underworld
where only shadows and
grief remain.
Who can live there
where the murky air
chokes in the throat,
where the sun never
finds its way,
a place where the flowers
(the remaining few)
wilt even as they are stirred by
gentle breezes,
even as they struggle
to lift their heads,
searching for rain.
Dorothy Walters
January 24, 2011
The above was written in response to a poem by a highly esteemed poet who has won innumerable prizes and honors for her achievement as a writer. She deserves all the credit she has received for her outstanding creative work. Yet, when we turn to the content, rather than the craft itself, of her poems, we find a sensibility caught in the nets of despair, one who perceives little or nothing to celebrate in the human experience (at least not in the poem mentioned above.)
One of the unbreakable rules of poetry as an art form (and all artistic endeavor) is that the poet must be free to express his/her own perspective, with no regard for the views of or possible impact on the reader or audience. Yet, we as audience also have (I think) the right and even the responsibility to consider the work outside the realm of poetry itself (where it is untouchable in this regard), and look at what it is saying to the world at large in terms of perspective or thought.
Many poets today focus almost exclusively on the shadow, the dark side of events and of their own experience. It is more or less assumed by such as these that any acknowledgement of the brighter aspects of life indicates a superficial view of things, a sensibility unwilling to face the "facts."
The "facts," to be authentic, must embrace the light as well as the dark, the life giving and affirming experiences offered to us and which often abound even in the midst of stress or challenge. To exclude either aspect entirely is to distort what it means to be alive in a world filled with threat and glory, despair and exaltation.
And here is where Kundalini comes in. A rich and postive Kundalini experience can remind us that there is a realm of sacred possibilities beyond the world of manifest experience, and that even our most trying times can be balanced by experiences of indescribable joy.
