To Go Against

The fact is that being a poet is itself a sacrifice because it is an activity respected by many but consistently enjoyed by relatively few. Most committed poets eventually respond to this by making a constantly renewed effort toward immense concentration or productivity and others turn to philosophy or various spiritual practices. To go against or, at the very least, to form some substantial internal critique of life as encompassing a straightforward goal of material gain – or, for that matter, any conventional notion of success- is the raison d’etre of a poet in contemporary terms.

-Nick Piombino, commenting on Tom Beckett’s blog

Nick’s comment echoes with profound clarity what I’ve been thinking about recently. I’ve realized that in writing not everyone is willing to take the same risks. Not only in writing, but in their own lives. We live in times in which the word “security” (i.e., “financial security”, but surely this has a parallel in the term “national security”, especially after 9/11) is used and abused as a key, defining element of contemporary life. Some people can’t even begin to deal with the idea of “risk”. The reason why I keep thinking about homelessness is because I cannot simply walk past as if that human being there was not I as well. Homelessness haunts me because I feel it’s an experience that poetry also expresses, both as a process (when writing) and as a “result” (when read, always considering, of course, that reading is always a process). It’s that and the fact that in modern times, as a culture, we seem to want to avoid accepting that we all are potentially homeless. You walk by wearing your nice stripey suit, listening to your ipod, waving your suitcase, and that human being is out there, hungry, weak, in pain, in lack. The poet should not be able to do otherwise but at least notice. The poet should be aware because it’s the world reminding him/her that there is nothing fixed or “secure” in this world.

Coming from a country where it is impossible to make a decent living as a writer unless you sell your soul to the government or the media, those who seriously decide they want to write, to live life writing, to write life living, have to deal with a radical insecurity that is indeed a risk. It is also a sacrifice. Not a religious, mystical one; not even one which is really voluntary. It comes in the package, so to speak: if you take this path you will have to accept that certain risks come with it. Not only the “essential risk” Blanchot writes about, but one that has to do with the most pragmatic and immediate questions of life.

We have been taught that “risk” is negative; “security”, positive. Poetry also means interrogating this.

To take the decision to write, or to be a scholar, or a cartoonist, for example, implies, for me, the conscious acceptance of a series of risks. One has to face that, or take a different path, signing a contract with your own blood.

The poem is exile, and the poet who belongs to it belongs to the dissatisfaction of exile. He is always lost to himself, outside, far from home; he belongs to the foreign, to the outside which knows no intimacy or limit, and to the separation which Hölderlin names when in his madness he sees the rhythm’s infinte space.

Exile, the poem then, makes the poet a wanderer, the one always astray, he to whom the stability of presence is not granted and who is deprived of a true abode.

-Maurice Blanchot

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“One drop would save my soul, half a drop!”

-Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, V, ii, 144