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| Photo taken in 2010, Stephen Morrissey with a bust of Tagore, on the UBC campus, Vancouver |
If you've ever done home renovations then you're familiar with load bearing walls. Basically, a load bearing wall holds up the walls, floors, and roof above it. I live in a small Cape Cod house in Montreal, constructed just after World War Two, and the load bearing wall sits on a single beam that runs across the width of the house, in the basement there is a steel post giving added support to the beam, but it is the beam and the wall above it that is doing the load bearing.
I think of literature and being a poet in the same way. There is foundational, load bearing literature, that supports both contemporary Western and international literature; for any poet it's a good idea to know something of this literature. That is why getting an education, either formal or self-taught, is important; it is important to have read Victorian and Romantic literature, or Restoration literature, or Whitman or Chaucer or Dante or Tagore, or other poets; it is important to have read Homer, the Holy Bible, and the earliest literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh; or T'ang Dynasty poetry, Du Fu, Li Bai, and Han Shan. Read Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Dryden and Milton and Shakespeare. Read Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg. Read the bible, it is the load bearing foundation of Western literature. You don't need to be an authority on canonical writers or read everything by these writers, but at least know they exist and where they belong in literary history and one day read their work, or the work of a few of these writers. This reading is a poet's foundational knowledge, it is the load bearing literature that makes a poet's work possible.
But we live in an age in which the attitude of some poets is that a literary foundation isn't necessary -- they find it oppressive, or the writers are oppressive, or what have you -- so just read the current writers they approve of, and cancel the work of dead white men and women. Of course, this is self-defeating but it is an attitude that even some school boards are following as they delete or censor books by foundational writers, the writers and thinkers who made contemporary literature possible. I mention this because we are living in a time of cancelling literature that doesn't support an ideological Woke world-view. School boards that delete or cancel literature in favour of only certain contemporary writers are not doing their students any favours, they are keeping them ignorant.
And yet, all poets need the foundational work of previous generations. The older generations of writers are the load bearing writers that give contemporary literature substance and depth; without this load-bearing literature every new generation of writers is a dead end, writers reinventing literature, inventing the wheel. And what a waste of time this is when even just a good anthology will help introduce younger poets to literature that is necessary to be a real poet, not a poet manqué.
I know that real poets, young poets, will follow this advice because they want to learn and they have the enthusiasm to go beyond what is currently fashionable. I once wrote that "poetry will never die"; this was in response to the popularity of Tik-Tok, YouTube, social media, video games, and popular culture. And today's Woke people make things worse, they are intolerant of anyone who does not agree with them, cancel culture is their weapon. So, while poetry will never die it might have to go underground as long as the Woke era is still active; but even Wokeness will pass, it's just a matter of time, and the load bearing foundational literature of Western society (and by extension all great literature) will still be there waiting to be read.
