Submitted creative writing by Colby Smith
Poetry is more effective than every spoken or inward prayer, every minor or major ritual, and every fleeting or fundamental myth when confronting the mysteries of Nature.
Poetry shapes the only prayers and invocations that the gods could want to hear. It is the ritual that yields foolproof results without burning or bloodshed. It is the myth that consecrates myths in bone, organs flesh and hair from the oral tradition, whereupon the mysteries of Nature necessitated explanation before the mythic verses were transcribed.
Poets are the most qualified to speak of gods, and the most qualified to destroy them.
Poets are also—in symbiotic alliance with philosophers, historians, alchemists, magicians, scientists, and mystics—the most qualified to not only describe Nature in heightened, crystalline terms but also to reframe, reinterpret, recreate, and refute Nature altogether.
Poetry is an informal science.
Poetry is synonymous in aim and function as a formal science: to lay bare the unknown, to transmogrify incoming sensations, interpretations, and confusions of Nature into a framework and, ultimately, a cosmos.
Consider, above all, Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura.
Formal science would be forever-infantile without poetry and, more comprehensively, art.
The formal sciences could scarcely be understood, even by the most authoritative experts and curious scholars, without the aid of pictorial representations and figurative language. They are fundamentally essential for treatises, Antiquated and Modern, on mathematics, physics, chemistry et al as much as the bombastic effigies of creatures which adorn the pages of the Medieval bestiaries and Systema Naturae alike. This is likewise true for analogues in the Islamic world, dynastic China, the Indian subcontinent, etc. Art is also influential in the exploration and acquisition of territory. This is especially true with regards to the conquest of the New World, from paintings and written accounts of the ecosystems and societies of the “new” continents that were always an open secret. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, indeed, might have been an early dramatic parable of the British Empire’s unleashed, endlessly-nurtured insatiability for land, spoils, and delivering the heathens unto Salvation.
Then there is Homer’s immortal metaphor of the wine-dark sea; Blake’s Tyger wrought by He who made the Lamb; Coleridge’s and Baudelaire’s mutual admiration for the albatross; Attar’s birds led by the departed King Solomon’s hoopoe perishing in droves during their pilgrimage towards the fabled Simorgh; the thematical traditions of waka, tanka, and haiku; the beloved trope of talking, jester-like animals in nonsense verse, per Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.
Poetry is also indispensable in the context of archaeology. Without the albeit-fragmentary preservation, discovery, and subsequent translations of the Gilgamesh epic, it would be nearly impossible for the modern reader to imagine that Iraq was once teeming with cedar forests in which the terrible Humbaba dwelt. So, too, are texts like the Gilgamesh epic quintessential for deciphering the mechanisms of bygone languages, often in their highest form. Most vitally, poetry captures, in still-life fashion, religions both extant and extinct, from Creation and
Apocalyptic narratives to rites and prohibitions, such as the many unclean animals catalogued in Leviticus; and, much more recently, exhaustive instructions in magick for the Thelemic acolyte laid forth by Crowley’s The Book of the Law.
Nature is what is and what was, always, eternally forward, standstill, and in reverse.
Poetry is more pertinent to humankind than any government, ideology, or hierarchy.
The only form of writing that could be more ancient than legal documents—particularly the Code of Hammurabi—is poetry. It is not inconceivable that, even in our orthodox timeline rather than a distant alternate timeline, prehistoric peoples as early as Homo erectus recited rudimentary poems about the fires they had stoked and the carnal tools in their arsenals; nor is it inconceivable, when Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis began producing cave art, that ballads born in the shadows of those caves were centered around the animals on the walls which they hunted, admired, and perhaps worshipped.
Much poetry, from any epoch in history after the Neolithic Age, is a reaction to the prowess and folly alike of the poet’s society they have chosen to either embrace or reject. Though societies—so, too poetic forms, conventions, and the languages they are written in themselves—are transient, the essence and science of poetry have permanently dyed the human spirit every perceptible color at once.
Poetry is employed by the monarchist as readily as the republican, the anarchist as readily as the fascist.
Art outlasts propaganda.
Nation and State lie in wait to devour poets living and dead. So art, which both shapes and deconstructs history, can do nothing else but serve the mythos of Nation and State. Undead poets, reanimated by Nation and State, are rechristened as national poets; they are idols of gilded ages that must not, under any circumstance, allude to decomposed or gestational ages of bronze, iron, steel, silk, spice, aviation, chemical agents, or plastic.
The poets devoured by Nation and State—digested and spared reanimation altogether—remain martyrs.
Nation, State; their megalomaniacal masters; their shameless, invertebrate servants; their tentacles such as markets, monopolies of violence, and rights which are not inherent, but granted are enemies of poetry.
There are no greater enemies against poetry, besides humanity’s eventual extinction. There are, consequently, no greater enemies against Nature.
Poetry lies beyond mythos and is subservient to Nature, for poetry expresses what cannot be expressed otherwise of Nature—what can even be expressed at all.
Propaganda revels in mythos; that fragile, dialectical demiurge touted as eternal and justified.
Poetry is not enough to not merely resist mythos and propaganda, to embrace only Nature; nor is poetry alone enough to vanquish them.
The bleary eyes and calloused hands of Nation, State, and their tentacles—so eternal a mythos that they could only arise after the militaristic loneliness of the city-state, the decadence of the Old-World empires, greasing the hands of the of the jealous Church till they’re slick as a
hagfish, the abolition of feudalism, the notion that diverse groups scattered throughout a region share an ethereal commonality, and so on—would certainly have had their sway over the Earth, whether us humans had our poetry or not. Change, both progress and regress, can be likened to making pottery. Once the pieces are removed from the kiln, it is too late to re-mold the clay with one’s hands any further; in other words, for thoroughbred change to come out of mere reform, reorganizing, or rebranding. The old pot is to be shattered and a new pot is to be made in its place.
Had poetry never existed, change would be humanity’s burden alone.
Economies cannot be established by the will of a forest itself, nor could a military be assembled by the moon, or a Nation-State by a boat-devoid ocean, or a culture by the atmosphere, or an empire by every animal feasting and writhing over an entire landmass.
Since poetry is with us, however, the last three-hundred years or so have shown that authoritarian rule of any stripe, knowing the threat of poetry against their goals for their regimes to be monocultures of submission, can never excise poetry from the human spirit. This is especially true if a particular verse—even a single line that can easily metamorphose into a fleeting, compulsive cultural idiom or, more menacingly, a rallying cry—is useful in feeding the mythos, even when the mythos is bound to explode.
Poetry is the deadliest weapon ever devised.
Poetry will remain with humankind longer than any of its other, pseudo-grandiose inventions.
The poet outperforms Hercules.
