Timely Versus Timeless

Earl Gray's 153rd Law

     Most poets keep their art and their politics separate.  We have different blogs for each.  Recently, a critic demanded to know why we pursue pressing issues in prose but not in poetry.  It's a fair question, at least until we consider the difference between those two modes of communication.  One spreads out in two dimensions, going viral as it spreads from one venue to the next.  The other spreads in four dimensions, as it ascends into listener's memory and is carried verbatim into the future.

     Without degrading professional standards we can write a news article in the morning, post it, and see it picked up by social or print media immediately.  It is part of that 24- or 36-hour news cycle.  

     Prose is timely.  You can get up the next morning and start all over.

Earl Gray's 42nd Law.

     To write a poem worthy of the name may take, on average, a month.  Find le mot juste, satisfying demands of sound, sense, cadence and form.  Performing it may require weeks of additional practice and film editing before uploading it to, say, YouTube.  Once presented, it needs to build an audience, one who can quote it on appropriate occasions.  Were poetry alive, this may take another month.  Given current reality, it may take a generation or more before enough listeners can inspire enough other listeners to hear and absorb your verses.  Once they do, you will have a demographic affected by your words, one that might pass them on to future generations.

     In any event, a poem about the current state of public affairs won't have an impact until well after the next election, if ever.  If it does, though, it can cease and go on preventing inequities forever.

     Poetry is timeless, even though its effect might not begin until long after your final sunrise.