The Death of Simile: The Future of Poetry?

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

from "The Trouble with Poetry" by Billy Collins

I am sitting at my desk, wearing a pink cardigan over my pajamas. It is still dark. It is not yet morning. I hear the pied piper ice cream truck, already sounding its chimes. I hear church bells from the nearby Basilica. I hear garbage trucks. I look at my plants and notice my rumpled bed.

There is nothing more to compare these moments to, dark and warm here in my room, and I wonder what will happen when we run out of oil, food, materials for recycled messenger bags, and similes, and when everything just stops.

Perhaps, in a way, this has already happened. Some have already taken a choose-your-own-adventure approach to the creation of images. If there was ever a harbinger of progressive poetics, it would, of course, be Soulja Boy.

'We on the phone like...'
The profundity of this and similar lyrics compels me to wonder if perhaps merely the first half of any simile is necessary, followed by beats, mumbles, a melodic representation of a ten-digit telephone number, or a string of da-da-da-das. Because for some reason, when we hear "We takin' pics like..." we know exactly what he means.

Proposed Solutions
Now, if the solution to the so-called "oil crisis" is a so-called "lifestyle change," how can we remedy this comparison dilemma?

'You could be my Bonnie, I could be your Clyde'
One idea is to start using metaphors exclusively, thus doing away with "like" and "as" altogether. Unfortunately, this concept is like switching to corn ethanol: unsustainable and pointless.

'Everything about you I like it, I love it'
Or, we could just stop describing things altogether. We could stop needing images. We could stop needing to know about the steaming coffee, how quiet the night was, how the curtains swung, the taste of cinnamon tea on her mouth, his whistling, the smell of spring, the morning light. If we could stop wondering about these things we could go on without poetry at all.

'No tellin' what I'm gon' do; baby I'm about to show you'
Maybe, in the future, our minds will be born already full of images. "My love is like," you hear, and in an instant your brain selects an image from its catalog of comparisons. Jamie Foxx, however, must have had an English teacher like mine, always harping to "show, don't tell" in our compositions, and this--this gives me hope for the future of poetry.

History

A Stone Jug

A bulldozer digging a pond
on my mother's family's land
unearths two stoneware jugs
buried four feet in the ground,
one broken and one intact.
Who put them there? When? Why?
We suppose, but can't explain.
Those who have come and gone
are gone. How lost to us
they are whose lives passed here
in the sun's beauty and sorrow!
And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?

-Wendell Berry

The more I discover about The Future (that the world will end in 2012, snakes of zero thickness will continue to eat themselves, there will be no fresh water, holodecks will be the next Lynagh's (or we will go to Lynagh's via holodexing!)), the more I find myself thinking about the past.

What about time travel to the past? No way. I think the first time travelers to the past will be fun-ruiners, spying on everybody with wide eyes and writing things down and taking pictures with their futuristic image-capturers and always suggesting better ways to do things.

So I wrote a poem about the things I've been thinking about for the past few hours here in a coffee shop in Louisville.

Rumors

And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?
(Wendell Berry, "A Stone Jug")

This is what the first man thought
as he pierced the skin of the first roaming animal
and watched her children scatter
as she sank to the earth.

This is what the first woman wondered
as she dropped the seeds of the first fruits
and watched the sprouts bloom
into a tree she wouldn't outlive.

They pondered the assurance of this constant renewal aloud,
quietly, in a language we no longer understand,
a simplicity we have forgotten over time,
as instantly as a twig is stamped, snapped.

This is an assurance growing steadily weaker
as we forget the future, as the land ever changes,
as it is dug and excavated,
developed and exhausted.

This is what we know:
only what has been passed down.
Stories and symbols,
artifacts and imprints.
Still, they are only rumours.

I've Seen the Future, Brother:

"It is murder."

If the great poet Leonard Cohen could pen such a dismal prediction, how, you may ask, are we so optimistic about the future?

Thanks to Nate for sharing this link, which will lead you to an article from FromTheWilderness.com, a website claiming "More original reporting on Peak Oil than any other site on the net." The article, "An Important Announcement" by Michael C. Ruppert, asserts that there is, in fact, no "Plan B," addressing specifically the issues of oil and energy. (Be prepared for "Some Dots," an alarming list of evidence to support his topic.)

True, there is no Plan B. Clearly, biofuel, etc. won't suddenly solve problems. There are smart scientists, yes, but they can't fix anything, just innovate and improvise. We've done some real irreversible damage. My purpose in this entry, however, is not to discuss, however true, the idea that "Nature does not grant time outs," a wise statement made in the article by Mr. Ruppert. There will be more on future environmental issues in a future post. No pun intended.

"The victim has been the future," says the article, and I will agree that the victim still is the future. Literally speaking, the phrase, "The victim is the future" is very serious. Structurally and grammatically speaking, one finds it quite interesting as well. One way of analyzing it is to imagine the future as a real victim, cowering and taken complete advantage of. Another is to realize that what we are doing now does not affect us now, but it will. Basically, we can see the future as an object in itself, something we can save, or just as an idea, vague and distant. Which will affect how we act more?

Something they say in Ireland is "I'm just after [present participle]," and I've been lately considering this linguistic phenomenon as a way to perceive everything we do: that everything we do affects us. "I'm just after talking to my mom" or "I'm just after getting my exam results" both affect us. It's like saying, "This is me after doing something that has clearly changed my life." For example,

"We're just after using up all the oil." But Then What?

I can't (yet) propose any ideas for alternative energy sources. I am simply trying now to prove why the future is something to be optimistic about. Over the summer I read a book by James Martin called "The Meaning of the 21st Century." I don't agree with all of it, and you won't either, and the book's attempt to cover nearly every vital issue results obviously in a lack of details, but the book provided me with a surprisingly optimistic outlook at how things could be if we started doing things right as soon as we can (now). Maybe I just liked it because it was enlightening and educational but also made me feel warm and good, like listening to NPR. It was the first book of its kind I'd read, and I read it not as a manual of problems and solutions but simply a broad collection of possibilities. It empowered me more with information than it did monger doom.

I do declare that the future is awesome. We as a generation are creative, bright, and passionate. That's not to say we're too smart to do something stupid. But change is possible. It doesn't mean waiting for government regulations or big corporations to change policies in order to effect some sort of change. At last count, there were over 6.5 billion individuals. (More on population later.) Maybe the best option now is to do the best you can and encourage others to as well.

"The victim has been the future" but the future is not murder. At least, it doesn't have to be.