by Anthony Doyle

Poor poetry. Such a bad rep. 

As Ben Lerner says in The Hatred of Poetry, writing a poem is a heroic gesture doomed to failure, because it attempts to do something nigh-impossible: be totally unique whilst speaking to universal experience—and doing all that with song. 

It’s not hard to be unique (we all are). It’s not hard to speak to universal experience (we’re born contributors). But try doing both at once, and set to a drumbeat made out of syllables… Poetry, he says, “arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical . . . and to reach the transcendent or divine.” What could possibly go wrong? Tilting at fire-breathing windmills…it’s a strange occupation to choose, and a thankless one, too. 

When poets are not being scoffed at for being genuine failures, we can also be derided for being posers (inauthentic failures). That’s largely because being a poet is quite easy to fake. You can appear to be doing it without actually doing it. Just write down pretty much anything, break it up into shorter lines, throw in some indents, give it a catchy title and…voilà: you’re a poet. 

So failure or poser, the poet cannot win; paradoxically, we’re the only thing full of hot air that never actually rises.  

Individually, we’re an inconvenience. Collectively, we’re a plague. An infestation.

Yes, poets are everywhere, and so are our poems. You’ll find us/them on social media, on hand towels, on subway trains, graffitied on underpasses, printed on T-shirts. You’ll find us scrawled on the third tile from the left, three rows up from the floor of the school restroom, just under the leaky sink…

Yes…poems are literature’s cockroaches. Want proof?

• They teem in their millions
• They feed on literally anything at all
• Kill one, ten more take its place
• You’re never more than a foot away from one, know it or not
• There are 4,600 different types
• They will survive a nuclear blast

Okay, that last one is not exactly true. Contrary to popular belief, cockroaches would not survive a nuclear war. Blattaphiles (yes, “roach lovers”) reluctantly acknowledge that the intense heat would put an end to their beloved Gregor Samsas, one and all. 

But poems would survive. Poems will. 

When those post-apocalyptic, bunker-dwelling Adams and Eves re-emerge from underground, minus their smartphones, laptops, tablets, moleskines, poems will begin to appear all over the waste land, scratched into the walls of ruins or etched into rockfaces. Poems will mysteriously turn up on charred ground, like crop circles in corn fields, or old SOSes arranged out of wreckage on dead beaches. There’ll be elegies smeared onto the sides of burnt-out cars; odes scrawled with metal into blackened concrete; sonnets gouged into radioactive mud in some brave new cuneiform. With time, epics will strut triumphantly across abandoned concourses, the flagstones turned to stanzas, daubed, if need be, in human blood.  

If we survive, poems will survive. Because when our vast literature gets blown to pieces along with the badly designed Death Star that is our civilization, it’ll be poetry they take with them into the escape pods. No novels, no plays, just a volume of poems. Condensed poiesis. Poetry is the seed, the source code. An iamb’s all it takes to set the cogs in motion again. 

Perhaps on those long Fallout nights, with no streaming, no social-media feeds, nothing to entertain us, the poet will be appreciated for what Lerner calls our “tragic failures”, and for the occasional bawdy limerick or snide acrostic. Our day will come again. Our star will rise. 

And we still won’t sell, because there won’t be any money.  

As for the cockroaches, not even the anti-Noahs of the exterminating arts will keep them out of those arks. So they, too, will escape the purge. We’ll see them scuttle free alongside us to reclaim the world…with a haiku scribbled on their backs.

Anthony Doyle is the author of the novel Hibernaculum and the poetry book Jonah’s Map of the Whale, coming soon from OSP.