Day Twenty-Six and All Poets Bear Witness

All Poets Bear Witness

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“I think all poets… are caught in a situation, have a very difficult role to play.  Insofar as they’re real poets, they are committed to the welfare of people, of all the people… Our effort is to bear witness to something which will have to be there when the storm is over.  To help us get through the next storm.  Storms are always coming.”

-James Baldwin (1970)

All poets bear witness.

Right there.

Full stop.

When I began writing poetry, I was already an old man.  A meme I read the other day will tell you just how old,

“In banana years, I am bread.” 

Not unlike a lot of my poet peers, peers, not in age, but in time served, I wrote poetry because I wanted to die; I just didn’t want to do the deed myself.  Because of that fear of the great beyond, and my place in it, I chose instead to write the poison from my system, one shitty, self-indulgent poem at a time. 

Almost a decade later, my first full-length book of shitty, self-indulgent poems was published, and two years later, a second.  Then, within that same year, and with a third book of shitty, self-indulgent poems set to go to press, I had what I would call a poet’s epiphany.  With a couple of weeks to go before my third book would be made available, I told my publisher no. 

What I actually said was, “I’m pulling the book”.  When asked why, my reply was, “Because it’s shit”.  Now it’s five-and-a-half years later, and I still haven’t written book number three.  Looking back on all the poems I have written from the beginning of 2018 until now, I believe I have done the world a great service, by simply not letting anyone read those poems, except in very small numbers, by only a few trusted individuals.  It’s funny, at least funny to me, funny in a way that most people don’t see as funny, but whatever, that I am grateful that there is nothing come to print of anything I wrote during those five silent years, when circumstances mostly beyond my control afforded me a luxury that a more… accomplished… writer might not have been gifted. 

Time enough to shut the fuck up, and listen.

Time to listen to the hearts of loved ones, listen to the words of chosen family, and not merely chosen by me, but me, having been chosen by them, for reasons I am still unsure about.  And ultimately, time to listen to those who came before all of us, who’s words I do not consider myself worth of, or worthy to share, through my own.  Words like those that preface this post, without which, I would have likely remained silent, still soaking in my own poison.  Words that slapped the self-indulgence right out of me and, I hope to God, make my own words finally worthy of being read. 

That quote of James Baldwin, first spoken by him when I was nine years old, brought me from a place of shitty self-indulgence, wherein the only thing I bore witness to was, well… shitty, and self-indulgent… to now, when we understand that a poet, a real poet, is alive to be committed to the welfare of people.  Of all the people.  And to, I might add, NOT bear witness to their own shitty self-indulgence.

Because there is an entire world before us to bear witness of.  Bear witness of its joys and its fears, its triumphs and atrocities, and its storms, for in doing so, we call out the evil, and call in the good.

Because storms are always coming.

Talk to you tomorrow.