Make it New!

if I spoke gibberish to you
would you then listen
even at last to me?
-Darla Whitehead, Book of Evaluations

If you could see that has been seen by those of you who have died, you would be puzzled and troubled. Then you would have listened and obeyed; but what they have seen is yet curtained off from you. Shortly, the curtain would be thrown off. You have been shown, provided you see and you have been made to listen provided you listen, and you have been guided if you accept guidance. I spoke unto you with truth. You have been called aloud by (instructive) examples and warned through items full of warnings. After the heavenly messengers (angels), only man can convey message from Allah. (So what I am conveying is from Allah). - Ali ibn Abi Taleb, Commander of the Faithful

Knowing which of the nafs to pay attention to, that's the thing.The one that blames, the one that loves too little or too much, the one that writes poetry or reads it to oneself or to the others. The one who sits inside a room with other nafs, converses and betrays the self, the honest nafs cannot get along except with other nafs of the same discipline because they are all true to the unique Allah and the instructions of same. This is the teaching. It is the learning and from that the nafs of the poet monitors each strange thing, with or without knowledge, with or without specific strengths and weaknesses and uses the language, the language genie to perform the necessary not obligatory acts of poetry. It is the deceptive activity of the heart and the hearts of others that teaches ignorance by ringing all the right bells and whistles without risking the hard task of truly teaching through poetry what there is to know in the proper language that only the nafs can truly understand and we physical selves master without knowing the import upon the disingenuous nature of our souls, that group of related things. We instruct our own selves: deception, apathy, remorse....we encourage desire and her cousins jealousy and greed.....but that we as poets teach others both unremarkable or absolutely poisonous lesson is to be made a matter of because, in modern poetry....there is an utter lack of proof that what is being taught is actually being known, at first, by the teachers of wit and wisdom (ruination and salvation, lack and presence, agreement and disengagement)....known more commonly as poets.

You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.' -W.H. Auden

How honest and true that is but written with only a superficial knowledge of the spheres, the archetypes and most importantly, the trusts that bond certain types of nafs together.

Archetypes upon which the new foundation of modern poetry are built (imagery) are only stable as processes within the writing of a new mythology that pleases certain groups to a much greater or much lesser degree. Make it New! is the dictate and within the fabric of that simple statement made by the Godfather of a great number of younger poets, Ezra Pound, is a profound truth and lesson. What does that dictate intend? To the impossible, unimaginable or simply, the unknowable commerce between souls? They should perhaps instead refer to themselves as Pentacostals for it is true that they speak in tongues impossible for most of us to decipher unless we practice the art of the 'close reading' when in fact most of them are entirely uninvolved in the act of 'close writing'.

That there is something old, something predated that requires a new disguise? Why yes, of course. And imagery as well as Objectivist mannerisms are suggested as the most fitting alteration in the garment of poetry...or languagism in which poets learn to converse not with other people but with other nafs. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes wrong but it is never really clear to me when they mean to.

And I guess poetry ought to at least mean to. It ought to take its share of the responsibility involved in disseminating both popular and unpopular ideations. The ubiquitous languagist school makes it new alright but keeps it the same by suggesting there is a wrong and right way to do things, record things. That there is a party to which everyone else belongs and they are somehow exempt from the rules of trade and barter in which the only currency might be a clippy tongue or savage intelligence able to distill prose into a hitherto uncharted and nonsensical poetic mind drill...well. There are several schools of thought that prove that poetry can be generated from overheard conversations all the way to computer search engines. It is not however proof that what is said within that context of accidentalism is either understood or apprehended by the party to whom poetry is actually addressed (when it is done well) and that would be the nafs.

Getting it half right (they were wrong i.e. the SoQ) is not the same as getting it right themselves and the nafs bicker incessantly not only within the individual but with the nafs of others. The untrained nafs who is not the captain of the ship but just one of the slaves who stole onboard as one of the crew with a variety of functions both good and bad, in need of a leader and a ship.