{"id":6394,"date":"2020-01-13T16:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T16:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=6394"},"modified":"2020-01-13T16:00:34","modified_gmt":"2020-01-13T16:00:34","slug":"poetry-in-2020-dream-and-so-create","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2020\/01\/13\/poetry-in-2020-dream-and-so-create\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry in 2020: \u2018Dream and so create\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of 2019, I wrote:<\/p>\n

In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change<\/a><\/span>, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the greatest poems I have read, an old man or great lady has already died, to be reborn inside my imagination at the dawn of a new reality. That essentially linguistic act, or border experience, at the heart of poetry, means that this art is perennially relevant, or always ahead of its time.<\/em><\/p>\n

The poems to which a few will continue to return must be in some way about the experience of being able to write to them from out of eternity, which is always to be found in the future.<\/em><\/p>\n

And it is in times like these that we need to listen to a still small voice that speaks from that revelatory moment when poetry completes the eternal act of creation in its own last judgement. Like the ancient scripture of different traditions, the poet knows we are living in an iron age, or Kali Yuga, and in his or her work, we come to withstand the day or night when the son of man is revealed.<\/em><\/p>\n

As W.B. Yeats declared in The Tower<\/a><\/span> (1928), \u2018Death and life were not | Till man made up the whole, | Made lock, stock and barrel |Out of his bitter soul\u2019; the world can only end were we to vanish from it; \u2018And further add to that | That, being dead, we rise, | Dream and so create | Translunar Paradise.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, Ireland: Yeats’s ‘Tower.’<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

New Year<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

At the beginning of 2020, I\u2019d still stand by those high-sounding words, but I would like to add that we have plans to make recordings of the poems we publish.<\/p>\n

Poetry may well be all that I have said it is, but it is also a deeply compelling, sometimes scandalously illogical, thing that exists in the ear as much as on the page.<\/p>\n

A revelatory moment for me in my twenties was listening to W. B. Yeats read \u2018The Lake Isle of Innisfree\u2019 and other poems on a 1930s radio broadcast. The slightly cantankerous old poet said that he would begin with this poem from his youth \u2018because if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it.\u2019<\/p>\n