Why I Write Terrible Poetry

I have realized, in my sleepless stupor-no-more, that poetry is humanity's always failing attempt to express the id.  Freud's id.  Which you know already.  And now I see why I write fiction, not poetry.  The id is not all there is.  The ego and the super ego are realities, even if the id is really me.  Artificially constructed, or construed, as they may be, they are alive in my conscious and my unconscious will never successfully be unleashed because it is my unconscious.  But perhaps my unconscious is what is spurring me to write, write, to write and not sleep and search for answers and push myself until I am delirious enough to speak something like the truth.  But you see, there is the barrier of language.  Even if a lion could speak, we would not understand it.  Who was the one who said that?  An intelligent man, but that is the problem.  My head tells the guts to spill, but it is my heart who obliges.  Yes, my heart!  And there lies the problem!  Poetry is wrung from the brain and the heart, when it is the guts that should be spilling!  It is the guts that throb inside us, the guts that defy expression!  Man always gets it wrong!  Heart, mind, heart, mind, fighting back and forth.  Enlightenment, Romantics, Victorians, Lost Generation, and so forth!  Of course, the "Lost Generation" comes the closest in a while to finding itself.  Hemingway pokes at the guts, Fitzgerald sticks his toe into the mess and wiggles it around, coming out with nonsequitors that try (and fail, of course, as always) to express that gut.  Close.  He comes close.  But they rely too heavily on the gut!  Like the poets of today!  The poets who know (and therein lies one problem) that rhyme and meter take away from the inherent chaos of the id, the lack of rhythm.  Silly Milton, who sat in his orderly rooms, scratching away in his orderly costume, espousing his "ideas" through that rhythmic sound over sense.  Silly, adorable Keats, who shivered and quavered in his humble dwelling, quivering out the yearning lines.  Silly, violent Byron, spiralling about in a nature many others would imitate, so that the blazers of Oxfordians needed patches at the ripped elbows, all that flailing and beating of chests and gnashing of teeth and glaring, seething of eyes.  And now, there is the poet who sits naked in his room, scrawling over the walls and scampering over the ceiling in an attempt to unleash, unfurl his guts.

But it is not so simple!  Poetry, ultimately, fails.  Yes, it stirs our passions and plucks our heartstrings and prods our minds, but never all at once.  Why do I write fiction?  Because my reality is more than my id.  The ego and superego are now just as real, and far more tangible, than the id.  They - the indefinable "they", because I have forgotten precisely who "they" are (I'm relatively certain "they" are connected with the sixties) - deny the importance of the ego and superego, tell us to free ourselves of those bonds.  Why free ourselves from the bonds that touch two thirds of the trifecta, the heart and mind?  The guts, or id, are not everything anymore.  Perhaps they once were, and perhaps some argue that they should be, but the fact is, the id is not all.  People call the Holy Trinity an oxymoron, or label it at the very least "paradoxical", and yet it makes sense to us that one person can be split into the ego, superego, and id, each contradictory and conflicting and seemingly impossibly interwoven.  Yet, here we are.  Poetry, I see now why I fail you!  You fail me!  Or you fail to fully express me!  And so the job of poetry will never be fulfilled, because it has been handed the wrong job.  Perhaps fiction will always fail as well, but that is yet to be determined (by me).  Fiction does not cut out the unnecessary as modern poetry does, because the unnecessary is necessary.  The unnecessary is a combination of the ego and superego.  The ego and the superego are a part of life.  This makes them necessary.  Paradoxical.  But sensical.  Fiction, or good fiction that tries, spares no aspect of humanity.  Tries to spare no aspect of humanity.  Give me the mundane, give me the actions and words of the people, and try to express what they do not express and perhaps to not consciously consider.  Of course, fiction is bound to fail also, since language is the medium.  But it comes closer.

I do not think it is true that white noise is the ultimate human expression, either.  It is too solid, too consistent.  Jazz is quite a bit like humanity, but sound too is limited.  Humanity is like humanity.  There we go.

I know the clock on my blog is behind.  It is 4:17am.  Unfortunately, no tea tonight.  Don't want tea.  I really would like some meat.  I look a fright, a lioness with a furrowed brow.  Too bad the library isn't open.  I'm in a mood to read Sylvia Plath's Ariel.  I've no copy of my own.  I really should own one, so I can mark it as my own.  Like when dogs piss.  I watched the movie "Sylvia" tonight, the one with Gwyneth Paltrow.  They got her all wrong.  It bothered me that they skipped right up until their meeting.  Sylvia wasn't herself.  Not pseudo-confident enough, not the sociopath, the attempt at lady lynx, the man-toyer of her diaries.  No mention of Richard either.  I'm such a creeper, reading all of her diaries.  I don't even love her, exactly.  I have great affection for her.  She reminds me of Lydia.  I fear for her, always, even though her death-by-oven was...almost fifty years ago.  Where has the time of Sylvia Plath gone so quickly?  Forty years is not so long.  Forty years isn't fifty.  There is plausible deniability in the age of forty?  Fifty is past prime.  That is crazy.