The Poet as Independent Thinker

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

Reality and its truths used to be the special realm of poets and artists. It was that peculiar set of sapiens who were best equipped to sniff out discontent, penetrate the collective psyche, synthesize what ails us, and illuminate the shadowed blooms. We are—should be—the ones to take in the world honestly and give it back transformed by clarity and depth. Reality is both our medium and muse, and despite the current confusion, true poets have always known truth. The imperative that this remains so is our raison and has never been more pressing. That “no one knows what’s true anymore,” should be, for the poet, merely a slogan.

Do we poets know what’s true anymore? We ride around in our skulls, peering out the double windshields on the front, eavesdropping through the sound holes on either side, and absorbing what everyone else is absorbing. Yet in a lucky moment, we’re singed by a passing fire-streak or trip over a sorcerer’s stone and suddenly, in the most improbable turn of events, we’re eyeing what no one else sees. We—and everyone seriously connected to poetry throughout history—recognize that flash to be a bald, ornery truth, there for the taking.

These exhilarating moments, these ideas alone, are the obsessions worthy of poetic talent and constitute the stuff and subject of consequential poetry. To pursue visions offered unalloyed like gifts careening through the atmosphere, capturing and transforming them for the benefit of self and others, is the very definition of independent thinking. Originality and style, not to mention potential readership, cannot get gotten in any other way. Poets and literary commentators since antiquity have all noted this phenomenon, which is itself one of those airborne truths. This essay is simply a refresher.

Weirdly, courting like a lover the epiphanies spotted through one’s own personality has produced the most stunning, deep, and haunting literature in both the East and the West during almost all of recorded history. Formal university training in how or what to write played no role. Great poets worldwide wrote by-the-way and on-the-way, alongside activities like drifting (Kerouac), practicing astronomy and mathematics (Khayyām), gun-running (Rimbaud), studying others’ literature (Plath), or doing nothing at all (Bashō). Their methods were akin to those of the geniuses of American jazz and rap, whose classrooms were not classes but ever-changing spaces full of smoke, noise, characters of all persuasions, constant energy, and the immediate audience feedback so necessary to creatives. That kind of hyper-real juice machine not only teases out independent thinking but requires it. Survival, artistic and otherwise, does that to people. That those beloved and influential art forms were born and thrived solely through independent practice is a testament to what can be had when spontaneity-of-mind meets talent under the right conditions. Everything takes flight.

One of the most complicating factors in the long history of independent thinking is the fact that sometimes, these winged things do not land gently on one’s current truth. Some come bounding “out of nowhere,” drop out of the sky, as it were, to crush a cherished understanding. Picking through this painful rubble is essential to the poet’s practice for the treasure it reveals, the honesty it compels, or the writing it enhances, yet strangely, “nowhere” has begun to irritate the modern mind. Until fairly recently, what blew out of this mystical place was deemed worth a look from most humans and certainly from artists and writers. Those who have traveled extensively during the 20th century know this to be why, in many traditional parts of the world at that time, the chance for villagers to offer their homes to visitors as accommodations was fought over like a prized jewel. Newcomers were a source of stories not often received from the outside world. There was no internet, occasionally no electricity, so gifting real gab over news and views constituted information “out of nowhere” for traveler and host alike. Novel. Shiny. Fun, and more often than not, requiring independent thinking. Or more challenging, independent listening. No one shied away from it. Poets might consider reviving that practice.

Increasingly, a modern truth might burn so brightly that numerous writers and artists—and filmmakers and podcasters and influencers both human and AI—have already pursued it ad nauseam. In this case, the serious poet is thrust into the difficult position of exploring the sudden inspiration ex novo or rejecting it altogether. Unless struck by a bolt so complete that a most unique verse tumbles out on its own—this does happen occasionally—ex novo is hard. It requires cogitating on one’s own terms about a topic everyone else has thought to death. A weight similar to what Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of reality” bears down with breathtaking import to harden the matter further, rendering it the ultimate test of intellectual independence. It can be done, but it is not for the faint of heart. Since when is poetry for the faint of heart.

At other times, the skull-ride might ferry us toward sheer newness in the cosmos, and it captures the poet utterly—a geological upset, a regime change, a baby, an asteroid from interstellar space. These, too, are tricky if irresistible poetry is the goal, and if we want our work to matter, it is the goal. Dismally, our era presents a specific and almost insurmountable problem with this case—when something new enters our world, it is YouTube and social media who become not only the reporter but Shelley’s ultimate legislator. No one bursts onto Google and types in “poems on Maduro’s capture,” thinking ravenously, “I gotta read one of these,” afterward doomscrolling to get more where that came from. Trying to write sui generis about a sui generis event, named or not, that has in a matter of moments been reduced by an algorithm to barely generic might better be left to AI. And yet no literature is better left there.

It is helpful to recall that independent thought and style, which are consummately connected, do not come from novelty or subject matter; they refer to how poets think. If a poem about Maduro is about Maduro, it may be in danger of signaling reportage. If it is about analysis of the Maduro regime, it might come across as historical scholarship. If it is about political violence—and if the general public were paying attention to poetry to begin with—it could act as sensationalistic click-bait. Where’s the poetry? It may inhere in the language, in which case language might save the day. But if a poem presents an issue with great style, subtle usage, and with thoroughly groundbreaking insight, then maybe…

The odds we poets already face—conglomeration-like takeovers in publishing, truncated attention spans, plummeting literacy rates, scrolling addiction—we all know the issues—have wrought subjects like politics, the passing of a grandparent, or kittens into a stark disadvantage in the hierarchy of modern awareness or lack thereof. Nothing short of a wild, vibrant originality is called for in such cases.

A reminder about this reminder: In review here is the imperative poets face to think independently. We have always faced such. The act is not only a developmental exercise, it is foundational so that poetry is respected, singular, inspired, and actually read by people, even non-poets. If a piece on Trump’s latest twist or the condition of our wounded environment simply complains to readers that the poet is displeased, YouTube will be waiting for that audience in the wings. Such platforms’ own invention and sheer entertainment value have already dwarfed not only potential readership but humanity itself. And they’ve got all the time in the world.

It may appear that this essay is urging the creation of poems only in cases where inspiration’s arrows have pierced the most literary soul, the puncture spilling forth only trail-blazing truths irresistibly presented, fully-formed Athenas from a Zeus-head able to wipe blank the cosmic slate. Not so. The shape and sounds of the medium buoy it up, its strangeness its own clarion call. Add to that a writer’s clean inner authority and all hell can be loosed, enjoyed, can lead to the easiest ditties, an experimental splash, or a long, well-researched unfurling that might garner readership or djinn up a whole new style. It is in these strivings that the nonconforming mind should most heed the advice of poet Michael Longley when he says, “If you don’t have anything to say, say nothing … silence is part of the enterprise.” Interims of golden void allow for meditating on what one really has to offer. This is useful. I once met in the Greek islands an extremely charismatic and successful Brazilian jewelry-maker who sold his wares on the street to tourists. One evening, I began to realize that, in the midst of the piles of cash he was earning, he would disappear for days at a time. When I asked him about it, his answer was itself a tiny work of art: “I like to make them miss me.”

We poets are ourselves confounding the ideascape—writing about wrongs instead of their truths, manhandling common insights in staid ways, missing or dismissing the gorgeous curve balls flying at our heads, even ducking to avoid a good injury, and breezily accepting misguidance rather than allowing the big, raw world to school us both good and bad. Poets cannot be afraid of nuance and the havoc it might wreak on their belief systems—real gems are illumed only rarely, and only glimpsed via dire mental freedom. By stepping into the independence of thinking, fear immediately dissipates because there is suddenly too much else to contend with, all of it enriching. We should contend, be contenders. And in the aftermath, the general public might even read us, knowing not whence or why.