Even if such a job exists in absence of a need or an employer.
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Which does not indicate that the poet is special but only that it is their job.
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For while anyone can place themselves in those vistas, by natural or artificial means, it is only the poet (which I use here as a byword for every kind of artist) who returns with an object or composition that, through its embodied meaning, functions as a tribute to the reality of those places.
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It occurs to me that the language used to describe such an avocation is similar to the language of intoxication. And that would seem to me about right. For the nature of poetry is such that the poet, in order to find and articulate the poem, must undergo a sort of intoxication, albeit without the ingestion of substances (at least not as a necessity), so that she can enter into those vistas where imagination and language can be fused into arrangements that otherwise would remain inaccessible.
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Which doesn’t mean that the person involved in flânerie experiences a literal jolt, but that, metaphorically, they are transported; they are in search of the oceanic feeling, whether they are aware of it or not.
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By which he meant, I think, that the consciousness of a person thus attuned to such surroundings will be charged, as if by shock or impulse, so that the fabric of existence would seem to them to shimmer, and they might feel more intensely the fact of their own being.
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The result of which is that, during these walks, especially in cities where there are throngs of people, and general patterns comprised of specific intentions, such an individual, formed of such a bearing, can experience an exhilaration or quickening that Baudelaire likened to entering “an immense reservoir of electrical energy.”
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That orientation being, I think, something like an alert form of lassitude.
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It isn’t for no reason that the figure of the poet is associated with the figures of the flâneur and the flâneuse. For while the latter do not seek, in the milieu of the stroll, or urban wander, artistic inspiration (as the former sometimes does), but instead immerse themselves in it as a mode of enjoyment alone, without any other end or purpose, all come to it with the presentiment that it will reward them in some way, so long as they comport themselves with a particular orientation, or bearing of the soul.
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That scenario would represent, I’d wager, the microcosm of the creative process to which I am referring (the macrocosm being the long, aimless walks and perambulations that, taking place outside, in parks or on city streets, often precede the conception of the larger work wherein the microcosm will occur).
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How often when I am writing do I get up from where I am seated, to walk across the room, away from my desk, impulsively it would seem, only to return to it a few moments later? As if some stoppage in the fluidity with which my work had been proceeding could be resolved, or would resolve itself, if only I imparted to my imagination, by way of my body, a jumpstart or kick, so that whatever configuration of words had till then been floating on the horizon of my brain, just out of reach, suddenly became clear, and availed itself to me.
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It seems unaccountable that movement would be necessary to this process, but it is necessary, at least for me. As if the circulation of blood that comes from walking, though not the pumping of blood that comes from exercise (which would be too vigorous, as it brings the mind into a different arena of functioning, a more vital and bestial one), engages some analogous aspect of the imagination, wherein a circulation of notions and preoccupations, both aesthetic and thematic, can begin.
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Poets need to wander about now and then, not daydreaming exactly, and not doing nothing (though they might seem to be doing nothing to an observer who doesn’t know them), but precipitating in their consciousness, as much by the physicality of their excursion as by its aimlessness and solitude, the conditions of imaginative excitement in which their work will be contrived.
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And, anyway, a true poet does not reject productivity outright, but only the idea that to be productive one must appear productive, that the result of one’s work should be a service or an item that is salable, practical, possessed of a clear function, and that participates in an ethos that does not contradict fashion, or currents of thought, but that contributes to the esprit de corps.
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Which isn’t to say that the productivity of everyone who belongs to civilization is suspect, or of questionable value, but that, to live in a way that is ennobling, rather than debasing, a human must accord to their conscience the highest place among their mental processes, which often means inhabiting a state of tension, with regard to one’s role or function within that civilization.
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Poets, it can be said, must waste their lives, but only in the sense that they reject any received notion of what it means to be productive. For they see that the productivity that is valued by the civilization into which they have been born is a joke, at best, and at worst a means by which the worldly maintain power, the vulnerable are oppressed, and all the beauty of life would be made into a commodity.
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The beauty of that final line is in its surprise and inevitability, but also in its ambiguity. Does the speaker mean that he has wasted his life because he has spent it in the sort of reverie we are witness to here? Or because he hasn’t spent his days like this until now? If the former, does he really mean “wasted?” And if the latter, what was he doing previous to this time?
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And yet I can’t help but be reminded of that poem by James Wright, Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.
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For if you wear yourself out in any other way, by indulgence, say, or dissipation, or treachery, you will find, as the years elapse, and you’ve required of yourself only that which is easy, that you’ve expended your love on nothing, rather than something, the very fact of which will turn that love, when you realize you have trifled it away and are still going to die, into its opposite — not hate (for that is too useful), but, as Elie Wiesel said, indifference.
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Only, the thing by which you wear yourself out must require something of you, even if you have a talent for it, let us say especially if you have a talent for it. That is, it ought to take from you all the love you are capable of giving, so that, were time endless, and you an immortal whose only way of finding meaning was by walking some landscape or terrain, a moment would arrive when you found yourself too tired to go further, and could only sit and be idle, or contemplate and pray, though fate would not be so kind as to remove you to another dimension, such as an afterlife, or an eternal rest, but would leave you where you were, existing, which isn’t to say it would look with disfavor on you.