by Mikal Wix
May 16, 2023
Mikal Wix is a queer writer who lives in the American South. Their work can be read in Corvus Review, Peregrine Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Roi Fainéant Press, decomp journal, Olit, Queerlings, Door = Jar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. As an old science editor, associate poetry editor, & holder of grad degree in creative writing, they collect literary anthologies from bygone eras to help keep vigil.
Every few years, an article purporting to know the fate of poetry appears somewhere among pop culture spheres, like a dump truck running a red light. The authors propose the argument, setting it up in the rhetoric of their discourse, which commonly includes pieces on other predicted cultural shifts, such as the Internet replacing the automobile, artificial intelligence ruining education, or climate activists paving the road to perdition. But these writers tend to lean heavily on hyperbole to shore up their contentions, and we all know that exaggeration is the bell jar over any thesis. There’s that well-worn adage about opinions being like elbows, or noses, or pick your body part, which is to say that they are rhetorical ploys that appeal to popular thinking. Suggesting that poetry is dead is akin to the red herring fallacy, “It’s true because many people think so.”
Poetry arrived in my life like so many before me: in elementary school English class, specifically learning about acrostic poems in 2nd grade. My first name has the letter “A” in it, and I assigned the word, “artistic” to it (when absurdism would have been more accurate). From there, we moved to autobiographic poems, wherein I wrote the following line: “I live in a beach and eat all the wind,” which on the surface seems ridiculous, but was a confession. My education continued along like this, where English class became my favorite to attend. And then, in middle school, I realized I was different from other kids in that way in which kiwifruit is rare in Florida, but it’s still a fruit. The ensuing discomfort over my feelings led me to bury a part of myself I couldn’t live without. When I first began to think of the poem as an option to counter the cognitive dissonance of being a queer teenager in the American South, my thoughts were geared toward escape. A specific mechanism to employ for the precise purpose of building a world wherein my body might flourish, poetry became a critical lifeline. One might argue that the ancient artform was a salve used by many to lessen the pain of life’s many burns. Of course, but writing poems offers much more than bandages to the wounded youth of the world; poetry can give life.
Now, I know the reader’s collective eyebrow just went up. By give life I mean to provide a working strategy to cope with stress, or to give life back. The ubiquity of stress in our lives is a given, both good and bad types, and both manmade or natural. The pressures of maintaining one’s emotional and mental well-being come naturally for some. But for others, those tensions become a heavy burden in which the weight of decisions overtakes the ability to thrive. Perhaps it’s natural selection at work (despair), or maybe it’s diversity at war with conformity (hope). No matter the rubric you apply, there are many among us who need a helping hand from time to time. And poetry is nothing but hands. The act of crafting poems has been restorative since the beginning. It’s no accident that the Epic of Gilgamesh contends with the heaviest of themes: that death is an inevitable fact of life. For thousands of years, poetry has been a fundamental creative force, an act of will in which our most precious lessons learned have been reified into concrete forms. Even before cuneiform script or runestones, poems were created and passed down through oral traditions, and those early poetic forms helped us remember the stories by using mnemonics. Those who propose that poetry is dead fall clearly into the despair camp because it’s not possible to be alive without it. Sure, maybe you could live your whole life without reading or writing poems. But when you sing hymns at church, you are reciting poetry. And when you tell your children nursery rhymes, you give them a gift. Poetry can even be found in the Journal of the American Medical Association, where it’s often used to help heal grief, loss, and wounds of psyche and spirit. Although possible, it’s unlikely that one could effectively avoid poetry throughout their whole life. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s definition of poetry is enlightening here: “the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.” The artform provides a way to imitate life (the nature of poetry) and to offer joy (the function of poetry) simultaneously. My first poems were about fear: of being discovered, of not being discovered, of dying, and of not dying. As such, they were utterly inscrutable by design, perhaps because fear is a truth without pleasure. My tutors were Whitman and Dickinson by way of the surrealists Rimbaud and Lorca. These early poems were sorrowful incantations to hide inside, but they performed like white blood cells in the body — rejecting, attacking, and dispelling all invasions of my body, identity, and desire. And as I continued to read and write poetry, my immune system strengthened, and the stresses surrounding me began to lose ground. In many of Dickinson’s poems, the genders and sexual identities of the poems’ speakers are ambiguous and mysterious. This poetic ability can be viewed as a strategy for her to explore the various possibilities, for her (their) psyche to slip on different tempos for the beats of her own expressed (or secret) gender and orientation. Her verse offers the poet a way to easily oscillate between queer and straight and among the variations of gender beyond the binary. These performances of disparate eroticisms act like the macrophages roaming the body, allowing the poet to make adventurous forays into assimilating the authenticate nature of themself into the world. The poem as mirror and window, both of which serve to heal the interior discord created by a cruel exterior place, can be looked upon by and through the evolving self. All to say that I adopted this same scheme naturally and quite by accident. Before I had ever discovered Dickinson, my first poems revealed that I intuitively knew that the only way forward involved lying and subterfuge, at least to others, and a bold experimentation of form and content for my inner identity, which was still in flux and extremely delicate to suggestion.Poetry became a secret life for me to sample roles and appearances, sometimes in pitch dark, and other times in broad daylight. The act of crafting a poem evolved quickly into the tantamount of getting vaccinated against a viral contagion, often referred to at the time by words such as patriarchy, heterosexuality, and normal. These terms are more accurately described as oppression, inequality, and invalidity. With every poem I wrote, my ability to fight off infection grew stronger, and my skills to self-examine became more adept, until one day a few years later, I shrugged off the cocoon and came out. Almost overnight, my poetry flowered into a bold and defiant exercise. In time, the poems began to reach out to help others who may have been suffering in silence, too, to show them how the art form can be a salvation, one that never relies on populist movements or abstract liturgy. Poetry is us; we are poetry, and poetry is here to stay. It evolves and will continue to do so just the way we are evolving. But make no mistake, poetry will be with us for as long as we are still here. It’s the one artform that naturally weaves itself into the fabric of every culture on Earth. Of course, there are others, but poetry is perfectly unique to our species. Take a moment now, and turn to look in the mirror and you will see a poem there standing quietly behind you, waiting patiently for you to notice.
©2023 West Trade Review
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Poetry Isn't Dead, It's Eternal.
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