David X Novak
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Must the Poet Succumb to Loss of Habitat?

4/27/2019

 
The habitat for poetry is vanishing. This is no different to the coral reefs dying, or penguin breeding ground ice melting, but is specifically human. I merely note the fact; it is hard to presume survival. Years ago I identified the problem of bees dying and tigers dying—without them what context can there be for Blake’s “Tyger” or Dickinson’s “To make a prairie”—but suddenly I see that the problem is worse. The “habitat” refers to an interior region in the human psyche, I think. “Animals make us human” is true (or nature makes us human). Without the one you will not have the other. Human empathy may be on the upswing, just at a time when it may be too late to do much good.

As city lights disrupt the habitat for night-flying bats, have cell phones done so for poetry?

Here are some lines on the topic:
​


Must the Poet Succumb to Loss of Habitat?


​With all their habitat destroyed
    The creatures can’t survive,
And such am I, before the void,
    As into it I dive.

As such I part and parcel am
    With nature, though a man,
But mankind’s mechanisms damn
    The world, with ban on ban.

With horror I perceive the fate
    I face, by others shared,
Which, though it seems to loom so great,
    Yet down will not be stared.

The modes of death are seldom kind;
    We pray they fall, less cruel,
While body has no war with mind
    Nor death with life a duel.

I pray, let me perceive, at last,
    The fuller picture, not
Some fantasy's false version cast
    By faulty modes of thought.

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