Epic Poetry

OK. I'm just gonna come right out and say it. Most people are too stupid to understand poetry.

I know how arrogant and elitist this sounds, but anyone who knows me in real life, who really knows me, knows that's not how I am really am. The problem is that sometimes the truth just comes out that way. Socrates told us to know ourselves and he said this starts by understanding that we don't really know anything at all. We start on the road to enlightenment by understanding our limitations. We're all cells in the body of life, so to speak, and cells have walls. Brains have skull caps. Cages have bars. We're not superheroes. We're flesh and blood and one day we're all going to die.

Poetry is one of those things that some people just 'get' and most people don't. But even the people who 'get' it need to spend years reading it - really, really reading it - before they can even begin to understand the greatest things that any language has to offer poetically. It's a very difficult thing to do. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes diligence and patience. Most people don't do it and they never will. I can't really blame them.

No wonder then that in this age of distractions so few people make the effort. But that's OK. I just wanted to come out and say it. I just wanted to get it off my chest. Because if even shorter works of poetry are so hard for modern readers to grasp, then there's not much hope for the epic poem as a mode of expression in the modern age.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm guilty of this shortcoming - maybe not as guilty as most - but guilty nonetheless. The epic poem is beyond me. I find them hard to read and I certainly couldn't write one. But I have set my eye on what I like to think of as the Longer Work, a poem, or set of poems that interconnect, to form a Grand Idea. Poetry just seems especially suited for this sort of thing, and it's hard to write poetry for any length of time without getting around to it sooner or later.

The poem that follows, which is a sonnet, albeit a strange one as far as form is concerned, didn't start out as a Grand Idea, but when I finished it, so many years ago, I knew immediately that it needed to be part of a longer work, not an epic poem by any stretch, but a series of sonnets, dark in nature, violent in their imagery and deeply interconnected. So I immediately labeled it as the first in a series of "Black Sonnets," even putting the obligatory "I" on top of it and waiting, patiently, for the rest of the sonnets to come tagging along, like lonely children, pale, hellstruck, eyeless and screaming on their one high peak, their voices like mythic owls in the long-suffering, eternal night of human existence.

Years later they did, like aborted fetuses, broken, wet and incompletely formed, but alive and crying to exist. What I give you now is the eldest of that hellspawn, that malformed father/brother of a Grand Idea, on a high hill, in the middle of the dark abyss of the hellstung, stillborn vision.

After all half of them are born already. Soon the rest will be flopping on the floor of my unconscious like hungry fish. They are coming - they are coming soon - and they bear my name. As Harlan Ellison might have said in his fantastic short story,"Croatoan," they have been waiting for me and they call me father.

- Jon-Paul Smith

- January 10, 2011

BLACK SONNET

I.

the children gather on a hill in moon-

dripped masses while the evening slowly shifts

and scuttles in their eyeless faces, noon

is dead to their surroundings, and the rift

wrong sounds of owls beat in their open throats,

a parentheses of consciousness, brief hope

implores the splay, skull earth - one knuckling note

enmeshed, incessant, on one hill erecting

one loud hill, a monument to ending

one loud grief; pity this human clay

that to the forces of one loud mind bending

these children resurrected from the grave

(like rain that's nowhere bound they hold their thighs)

one brief tongue to lick and curse the sky.

- 1991-ish