Why Bother?

Why should I, you, or anyone else continue to write poetry? Haven't all the poems already been written? There are love poems, nature poems, narrative poems, and on and on. What do you and I and anyone else have to offer new in the way of theme or content or form?

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Emporia, Kansas, another undergrad and I shared our "poems" (ironic quotation marks). The other fellow — whose name I've forgotten — surprised and shocked me by saying that there was no point in writing poetry because everything possible had already been written. I don't know about him, but, for better or worse, I've continued to scribble verses.

In a sense, my friend was right: the world probably has enough love poems, nature poems, etc etc. So, if I write a love poem for my wife, as I've done many times, why should I bother? Why not find the appropriate lines in the Song of Songs which Is Solomon's, in William Carlos Williams' The Desert Music, or Cole Porter? If I'm feeling blue, why not listen to the blues rather than scribbling a verse about it?

What makes the poem I write today — that you write today — different from the hundreds of thousands of existing poems?

The difference is that that theme, that content, that form is embedded in this situation, in the moment(s) in which you write. In other words, I haven't written this to this woman before, nor has anyone else. It is the situation, the personal, cultural, and historical context that makes it worthwhile to keep writing poetry. It is, of course, possible that  I or  you or  someone else will write something radically new. Ezra Pound's adage, "Make it new," is always relevant if difficult to achieve. Falling short of the adage, as I surely do, I can at least write in my situation.

This entry was prompted by a point of Friedrich Nietzsche's. I've been reading The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, in which an unpublished early essay of Nietzsche's is quoted. Trained as a classical philologist, Nietzsche wrote that classicists could keep their field alive by keeping it connected to their lives: understanding of the past is always vital in the context of the present (p. 30, my paraphrase).

If you wish a label for my position in this post, it is — existentialist. That's a label that's really a refusal to be labeled. Just keep writing, okay?