Poetry may be wonderful, whether or not we bother to read any. I try (often without any great success) to apply poetic principles to my own writing, to be succinct and precise and evocative with images and ideas. (Actually I usually sound like a pompous smartass.) I don't buy much poetry. Do you? The great best­sellers are long, over­blown, frothy novels, often vetted by focus groups; not tight collections of poems and short stories by master wordsmiths. Brevity doesn't sell.

Poetry doesn't sell in the US — I'm not sure about other English-speaking countries, but I doubt it. Poets in other cultures MAY support themselves by their wordy work; here, they either teach poetry in college or have other day jobs. Or they disguise their words within songs and screenplays, where sounds and lights and action serve to distract the audience from the literature, buffer them from the poetry. Songwriters (and scripters with good agents) recieve royalties; poets don't.

Raw poetry is obsolete in modern technological society, a bearer of "barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions," said TL Peacock long ago. Except perhaps haiku; but good haiku is almost scientifically precise, a brief description of the observed world, evocative in its clarity. Good songs may also be concise or at least short, but convolution is now acceptable; such may evoke with vague obscurity.

Epic verse is a throwback to pre-literate societies. But the modern world is rapidly becoming post-literate, where the greatest artform produces moving pictures. Cinema and television and videogames subsume painting, photography, sculpture, dance, theatre, opera, literature, design, the whole spectrum of art. As poetry in its various forms accompanies the moving and squawking image, it may survive; otherwise, not.

Poetry may describe the real and/or imaginary, the near and/or far, the internal and/or external and/or impossible. So much modern poetry works on small scales. Historic epics were painted on much larger canvasses, telling of epochs and adventures and triumphs and tragedies. And of travel.

Yes, travel epics; in their classic form, they tell the tale, "He-she-they went somewhere and did-saw significant things, and did or didn't survive to recount their story." And that's rather what modern travel literature does, minus some mythologizing.

That's travel literature, NOT travel guides, which inform us of the strategy and tactics of visiting another place. A how-to is quite distinct from a what-I-did. Tech writers should (and do) churn out the serious guides. Look to novelists and historians and cartoonists and other storytellers to provide a more human texture of place. It's too bad dogs don't write.

Yet, even as travel (like homemade music or video production) becomes more affordable and accessible and common and even economically necessary in so many places, so real real travel (like poetry) becomes obsolete. So many of the places you can go to are so very like the places you've already been and have left behind. The 'different' places become rarer, thus in higher demand by jaded tourists, thus prompting the installation of facilities — with all the comforts of the home you'll return to when this vacation is over. You've probably heard this before.

To which different places can you take poetry or any art? To which different places can you take yourself and, if you're an artist or storyteller, your audience?

Part of travel's obsolescence is due to the ubiquity-omni­presence of media and audiences. The makers of KING KONG previously made adventure documentaries in REALLY wild places, which were then presented (as was Kong) to eagerly paying audiences. Today's armchair traveler can now flick a remote control in the privacy of home or car, or click a link on their wireless computer or cellphone, and be instantly and vicariously transported to anywhere in the known or imagined universe, without even the necessity of turning a page or knowing how to read. One world, one heart, one sales pitch. If you're at home, here's a word from our sponsors. If you're not at home, it's a Kodak Moment. Or it was.

Just because something is obsolete, doesn't mean it isn't still usable. Every electronic device is obsolete before it hits the market, superceded by the next generation at ever-increasing rates, yet we use that old crap anyway. (Your DNA is probably obsolete too, but that's another story.) So some forms of poetry and some forms of travel will continue on into the forseeable future, like teddy bears and baptists and lard. And what new forms will evolve around us? Stay tuned for the thrilling previews. But don't wake me up, I'm still dreaming.

ADDENDUM

Poetry and travel aren't all that are becoming obsolete. Human culture itself is on the skids, and I don't just mean in that traditional sense that everything's going to the dogs or whatever. "These be parlous times: children no longer obey their parents and everybody is writing a book," whined Pliny the Elder back before Pompeii was buried. That ain't what I mean. Culture, as defined by anthropologists and other social observers, is what people do and make, and is thus intricately intertwined with technology. Pottery-making and stone-carving and writing-and-reading are technologies, and many cultures are marked and delineated by the objects and writings they produce.

But our post-modern society is a culture of consumers, not producers, except those who produce words and sounds and images that are never concretely realized beyond cyberspace. A tiny fraction of the populace actually produce anything, and they increasingly merely supervise the work actually performed by quasi-intelligent machines. An increasing portion of humanity, the global "middle classes" and above, consume the material and intellectual output of automata. That output may constitute a machine culture but it hardly fits any classical definition.

And so as people stop producing, human culture fades into a faint dream. Culture becomes obsolete. What people do and think becomes obsolete. As Zaeger and Evans put it, "Everything you do, think or say / is in the pill you took today." I do not say that this is necessarily bad, or good. Human culture may be tremensously over-rated. What has your culture (and I dont' mean corporate culture) done for you lately? Would you be better off without a culture?

See my Notes on Pop Culture

I read an essay wherein the author writes of being defined (as a person) by her possessions and her neighborhood, and how, when financial reverses left her near-homeless, bits of herself were lost as her possessions and range diminished. She was no longer who she was when she had a home and various stuff. She stresses the need to care for and keep in order that which we have and inhabit and are.

I read elsewhere that we are possessed by our possessions, that they own us as much (or more) than we own them. It logically follows that our stuff and our homes and our environs are also defined by who and what we are. I *am* (in part) my piles of books and pots and photos and debris; and they are me, as are my home and RV and tent and dirty sox. The latter can be confirmed by DNA analysis, eh?

Such definitions extend beyond the self, the individual, to encompass the family, the community, the state, the human race, and the entire biosphere. Each is not what it does not possess. My nation is partially defined by its highways, its overseas military bases and actions, its media industries, its physical and mental and moral resources. And they are all defined and haunted by the state, each possessing the other like secretive spirits.

I am defined and possessed (or haunted) not only by what I currently own, but also by memories of stuff from long ago. Those kit models of my youth: the Nautilus submarine, the Rat Fink hot rod, the P-38 airplane I gleefully crashed into the hamster cage (to the unease of its residents) — these are all me too. How shall I keep them in order?

We are what we eat, transformationally if not morally. We are what we watch and hear and feel and wear, all those videos and musics and toys and clothes and past lovers and pets. Yes, I'm defined by certain people and dogs and cats and rodents and snakes, and they by me. We're all defined by whatever sounds and images we plunge into and spew out. We all own and are owned by everyone and everything we've had and done and known.

We define ourselves by our travels. I wouldn't be who I am now without my having traversed portions of California, Germany, Nova Scotia, Guatemala, Hawai'i, elsewhere; and they'd have been different without my having been there, but not by much.

I also define myself by my hopeful future travels, by upcoming visits to Peru, Nepal, Turkey, Namibia, and Mars (my ancient homeland). Without such experiences and expectations, what am I but another blob of protoplasm lodged on the face of the planet? And who are *you*??

You are what you eat. Are you (the person) a vat of yoghurt, a carrot stick, a tub of lard, a dead cow or pig, a handful of fruits and nuts? What have you eaten lately and what are you now and who cares?

What has your community, your nation, your culture devoured lately, and what has it become, and who cares? Contrawise, what is going to devour or won or control you as an individual, a group, a society, a gene-poolk, and what will *they* become, and who cares?

With a bit of money and time and effort, and not too much of any of these, we can go and do and see and be a great many things and persons and stuff, which we'll then possess and which in turn possesses us. Is this bad, or what?

Liberate yourself from possessions and you are set adrift, cut off from what surrounds you, spat out upon the void. Immerse yourself and you become a slave, a prisoner, a possessions of your possessions. Quite a pickle, eh? Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't , something like that.

So, what to do? Go with the flow? Try to direct the flow? Can you re-define and re-invent yourself by having, being, doing, eating, remembering, wanting different goals and people and stuff? Do you want to re-build yourself? SHOULD you? CAN you? And who cares?

Am I always those hamsters, and do the hamsters care whether I am or not, and would they care any more or less if I freed myself from their memory? And who gives a rat's ass about a hamster anyway, except another hamster? Am I more or less than the hamsters I am? How can I tell?

So we are what we eat (and everything else). I can't change everything else right now but I think I'll eat some macaroni and cheeze and drink a beer. The meal will become me, and I'll become it, and be defined and possessed and haunted by it, at least until the next toilet break. Hey, maybe THAT'S the answer — in time, our definitions are all (or mostly) flushed away, as are we. Sacre bleu!

See some of my Notes on Travel

It's probably the summer of 1965. I've ridden an hour on a sputtery Honda 55 moped around the periphery of my Pomona birthplace, from the Los Serranos hills below the farm-prison town of Chino to the college-ivy town of Claremont nestled under the San Gabriel mountains. I escape from Chino as often as possible.

I'm at the Folk Music Center, then a wood-shingled record shop the size of a small bedroom, a dozen deep racks of records with acoustic instruments hanging on the walls. Behind the small counter is the owner's father-in-law, looking like that Italian-Swiss Colony winemaker. A backwards clock is above his head. Sound fills the air.

Around the corner in a narrow oak-and-ivy alley is The Golden Ring, a cinderblock room that on Friday and Saturday nights is a musical coffeeshop. Saturdays are hootenany open-mike nights — pay a buck to get in, have cheap coffee and donuts, bring an instrument and sing maybe. Fridays, that's when the country's leading folksingers show up - Dick and Mimi Fariña, or Rev Gary Davis, or Tom Paxton, or Doc Watson. Those shows are always way too expensive for me.

I spent a lot of time at the Folk Music Center,. where I bought my cheap dulcimer. ("We pluck dulcimers, not chickens.") One Friday afternoon Doc Watson came in to pass the time until his show that evening. He tuned an autoharp by ear, and told stories, smiling and blindly looking nowhere.

But this particular summer day, I'm leafing through the records as usual. All that Folkways and Elektra and Vanguard stuff. Here's a cheap Elektra sampler, Folksong '65, only two bucks — I can afford that, I bought it last week. Great songs: Paul Butterfield and Judy Collins and Fred Neil and Ham Camp. And Phil Ochs, singing The Power And The Glory, an anthem as great as Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land but newer:

  Here is a land full of power and glory
  Beauty that words cannot recall
  But her power will rest on the strength of her freedom
  Her glory will rest on us all

And now there's his new record, I Ain't Marching Anymore. On the cover he's sitting in an alley, back against a poster-strewn wall under a painted peace sign, looking like a nihilist surfer. Inside he sings his Draft Dodger Rag and Here's to the State of Mississippi and The Iron Lady:

  Have you seen the Iron Lady's charms?
  Legs of steel; leather on her arms
  It's written for a man to die
  A life for a life, an eye for an eye
  And Death's the Iron Lady in the chair

I knew these and most of his other songs even before I heard them, printed in the stapled-together BROADSIDE magazine (also cheap enough for my paltry high-school budget). They were a bit tricky to play, as I had no guitar, only a dulcimer, and my music sight-reading was a bit rudimentary. But somehow I managed, not that anyone would want to listen.

I tuned my social consciousness on those BROADSIDE songs, not just Phil Ochs' but all the others — Bob Dylan, Malvina Reynolds, Peter LaFarge, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, Janis Ian, Dick Fariña, Bernice Reagon, Danny Valdez, Alex Comfort, so many more. [I'm cheating now — I bought the CD set THE BEST OF BROADSIDE 1962-1988 cheap and it's playing now, the accompanying book giving me back all those names.] I worked my fingers on the melodies, stuffed my memory with the lyrics, filled myself with alternatives to mid-60s pop culture.

Phil Ochs' political songs are now mostly 40 years old, and still timely. Writing about travel restrictions (USAnians, stay out of Cuba!) in The Ballad of Willian Worthy:

  You are living in the free world,
  In the free world you must stay...
  There really is no need to travel to these evil lands...
  The whole world is off-limits, visit Disneyland next year.

Like Dylan, Phil Ochs went beyond the political-social limits of 'topical' songs, to the personal and experimental and classical. He set music to Noyes' The Highwayman and most memorably to Poe's The Bells. His Changes is a bittersweet lament of a lost family life. And The Crucifixion, a phantasmagoric concoction paral­leling Jesus and JFK, was appropriately recorded in a hot electro-synthetic swirl.

Phil Ochs was not commercially successful. He had a couple of minor hits: Small Circle of Friends (before it was banned from radio), and Joan Baez' recording of There But For Fortune. But he wanted 'success' and never got there. A Shel Silverstein song applies: Even A Living Legend's Gotta Live. Phil Ochs got strung out and depressed, and in 1976 he hanged himself. Nothing as spec­tacular as a crucifixion. Just gone.

From the Wikipedia entry:

" It is widely reported that the suicide was brought upon by depression resulting from a severe throat injury. While touring Africa, Ochs was attacked and stran­gled by his robbers, sup­posedly damaging his singing voice. He believed the attack may have been arranged by government agents. After his death, it was revealed that the FBI had a 410-page file on Ochs. "

I have odd snatches of memory of Phil Ochs, besides the songs. I remember his essays of social and musical criticism, usually smarter than what anyone else was writing at the time. I remember his The War Is Over campaign; declare victory in VietNam and get the hell out. (Unfortunately, it didn't work.) I remember that horrible gold lamé suit on an unfortunate album cover, and another album covered with poems by Mao Tse-Tung. He proved Mao was still alive because the royalty check was signed and cashed.

I don't remember the dead Phil Ochs, just the live guy. I see him as I saw him in New York in 1968, playing a summer festival in Central Park with his friends Jim and Jean Glover. I hear the songs where he's a reporter, a pamphle­teer, a poet, a prank­ster. I hear that nasal voice, as alluring as a buzz saw, floating over carefully-crafted chord structures and sharp word images. Occasionally I hear modern covers of his songs, by Ani DiFranco and Eddie Vedder and Billy Bragg and others. He's still in my head, ever-changing.

See my Notes on Pop Culture