Very often WH Auden is quoted out of context ("For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making", 'In memory of WB Yeats', Another Time, Random House, 1940) to end any discussion on the utility of poetry. For years, I have contested this because I believe that poetry makes everything happen — it is the very fabric of human life and society.
Yet, everywhere you look, poetry is under assault: it's study is deemed to be unprofitable, those practicing it are considered to either lazy or weird, and even if one manages to write poems, it is impossible to get it published respectably.
Why?
After contemplation, I have come to the decision that the enormous developments in the field of communication has been the ruin of poetry. The language employed in the construction of poetry is, by nature, the very contradiction of the language of communication. It is an attack on the rational centre that governs the linguistic structures with which we are familiar in our diurnal experiences, and by being, what it's detractors would like to call "obstuse", poetry invites its audience to contemplate.
But contemplation itself is taboo now; we are all men or women of action. We are all slaves of action.
I have, however, decided to break away, to be abnormal, to read at least one poem a day, and to find at least half an hour to contemplate on it. This is my manifesto.
Title: The Poetry Project
Aim: To read/write at least one poem a day and enjoy it
Maybe it will make nothing happen and I shall continue to do this alone till eternity and none of you shall read me. That doesn't matter, it is for my entertainment. But join me if you will, feel free to comment.
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