***
[A portion of ongoing novel]
Without our poetry, we cannot be. Not as human beings. Perhaps as cogs. The machine can feed us with tubes and shower us with hoses, and pair us off on the internet as it sees fit, to breed more flesh to pull the plow. The machine does not know about poetry. It knows some rhyme. A ditty, stolen from some loose lip, perhaps. But the soul, or the sight and sound of beauty and mind is not within its grasp. It knows only what is useful. But just as the machine cannot judge beauty beyond the formula of kitsch, the machine does not know poetry.
It is interesting to me that Wikipedia, a product of the machine, defines ‘kitsch’ as “a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naive imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous, or of banal taste.” It does not appreciate paintings of dogs who play poker. But it does appreciate splatter paintings and colorful geometry, and other forms of accidental art easily manufactured. It enthusiastically extols the sterile replications of the post-modern. But the machine does not have a sense of humor.
Poor Mrs. Benson, laboring over the clot of sex-driven minds in my senior high school poetry class, each with their own thoughts focused on the bell, could not have known that her efforts were not wholly in vain. She taught her poetry class with all the serious vigor that she could find in the face of so much apathy. I barely passed. But I had been infected, as if brushed by the mythical small-pox blanket, nonetheless. I may be a questionable or dubious poet myself, but I was reading Byron, on my own, within two years. And I thank her dearly.
Without poetry, I might not be here today, but enclosed instead in a glass and gypsum cubicle, ticking off the boxes until five.
Despite your resistance, you cannot hate the woman who had you read Don Juan and make it make sense that an indefatigable lover could have cuckolded his best friend—or consider that it might only have been the whim of Mary Shelly—too young to truly love, who was the brightest monster of all, and seduced a club-footed poet trying to make more of life than just the beauty of some Italian coast—or did she want a child so badly from her faithless husband. Ideas that might even make your hormones think. The machine would not know. But such adult thoughts, when I was only seventeen, have not been forgotten.
Dear Mrs. Benson. She must be long passed us now. But I do hope she knew what she had done.