An Aid to Consciousness

Esther Cameron’s comment to the Jan. 30th blog, regarding “social changes, brought about in part by the technology that scattered communities, and ...made the silent, lonely introspection from which the poem springs, to which it speaks, appear passe” deserves further note.

In a comment on her comment I said “In my heart of hearts I guess I hope that the energies which formal poetry can release (as it has since before Shakespeare) might help express and shape a social consciousness for the better --- away from our mindless consumerism --- and not be merely, in form's decline and the abject loss of its energies, a symptom of it.”

It’s true that free-verse confessional poetry speaks to “lonely introspection.” However, the incantatory power of writing in meter and rhyme, and its ability to burst one out of the sides of one’s habitual box of feeling and thinking, makes it different. It makes it a source of “extrospection.”

This can bring to both poet and reader new awareness, mindfulness, consciousness of a sustainable Earth community we now lack. If we reward readers sufficiently for reading outward-looking poetry, it may move them, too, to look outward. Moved by the poetry, readers may help shape a new consensus about sustainable community.

Let’s not throw up our hands as though we were victims. Readers who visit Esther Cameron’s website at http://www.pointandcircumference.com will see that she hasn’t. Bravo! Comments?

Leland