H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s
b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i
v e s E d i t i o n
RANDY ROARK
The Role of the Poet. November 24th, Konya, Turkey
Do you believe
in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the
Role of the Citizen?
No, I don’t. Do you believe in a Role for
the Dentist? My dentist is more
important to me than any
poet.
—John Tranter
There is a difference between people who
write poems and poets. Poets are those who embody a
way of being in
the world with a somewhat historically standardized and accurate profile. They
are in a world of
their own—in the world but not of it—like a door unhinged, by inclination or
experience. Poets live
apart from others, are free-spirited in their behavior and morals, and
there’s also something
slightly effete or dark and bookish and ultimately removed about them. A
poet is fully aware
in all moments of where they are in relationship to time and mortality—and
so are not really
where they seem to be at all. When I told people in Ireland that I was a poet,
they brought me
into their parlor and confessed everything to me, as if I were a priest. When
people feel they are
on an endless escalator going nowhere, the poet can articulate thoughts that
take people for a
ride to somewhere, or remind them of what has been forgotten, and sometimes
this remembering is
a form of medicine that can redeem a life.
Being a poet is a responsibility. As they
say, “First, do no harm.” Sometimes this is like Rumi,
turning in circles
around his heart, sometimes this is like Whitman, walking the streets of Brooklyn
with new eyes, or
like those who sing of things hermetic in order to make them visible, like Blake,
or those who
transform the ordinary into its true amazement, or those who dance in the
center
of a crowd,
turning the random mass into a throbbing wholeness. Or those who sing, who
weave,
who sculpt, who
paint something that is really something else, leading the eye to where the
artist’s
eye is, not was.
To do the real work so that your voice can become something other than just
your voice, to
transcend thought and then stay transcendent, to become something so much of
the essence that
the sense of self and time itself disappears. A poet is not interested in creating
the
new because they’re
more interested in discovering what is already here. Nothing of imagining
could equal this. A
poet unmakes. A poem or a painting or any work of art is not a representation
of something, it
is something. It is a sharp image of what is, and still is, not what was or
what
will never be. A
poem waits, a poem lurks, a poem hovers, breathing on
its own. It teases us, is
it something
being told to us, or is it something we remember? A poem is like a sharp wind
that
scatters the clouds. A
poem is a vision captured not by the eye in the skull but the eye that sees
through the eye, first
as the beloved and then as many other things as well, until all of the
obstacles
to joy have fallen away.
And then in the abject failure of every
attempt at trying to realize, we realize we cannot realize
and have no desire
to realize any longer. We cannot hold it or become what we want but can only
get out of its way
and surrender to it, and then a nothing, a no one, discovers there is nothing
left,
and that only when
there is nothing left can we know for certain what we are and what we are
not.
[Originally
published in NHS 2005, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs05/randy_roark.html.]