Conquering Mount Apathy

The manifesto of the Suburban Romantics, which I posted here recently, has also been posted by my friend and fellow Suburban Romantic poet Dominic, at this excellent Some Definite Service blog. He adds some very important clarifying comments.

So where do we take it from there?

Since my late teens, I have been caught between two conflicting facts. One is my overwhelming conviction that poetry, and especially traditional verse, is hugely important to the soul of society, the soul of a nation, the soul of any historical period or movement, the soul of man. And further, that it has probably never in the history of human life been as neglected as it is today. This is a matter in which supposedly "primitive" peoples were (and, I assume, are) infinitely more civilized than ourselves.

And, since my late teens, I have felt an urge and even a duty to do something about this-- which seems akin to Patrick Pearse's mission of "attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil".

On the other hand...

On the other hand, there is the colossal, mountainous, pulverizing weight of apathy and indifference towards poetry and its importance. Opposition is easy to face. It's even bracing. Indifference is almost impossible to conquer. How do you shout down silence?

Even conservatives don't care about poetry. Not really. They will agree with you, and then go back to ignoring the subject, all the while denouncing cultural decline and our era of barbarity.

Christianity is counter-cultural. Nationalism is counter-cultural. Poetry is far more counter-cultural than either, in my view. (At least in the West.) This is one subject where conservatives are effectively on the same side, for the most part, as progressives and secularists and globalists. The idea that they would spend a fraction of the time and energy they spend on music, cinema or fiction on poetry is just unthinkable. The idea that one might re-read poems as one listens to an album over and over, form a relationship with a poem, make it a companion in your life-- just crazy talk.

I have recently decided to take a big step back from social media (Facebook and Twitter; strictly speaking, this blog is social media, but I will keep blogging). This is for many reasons, but one of them the near-complete silence that greeted my attempt to launch a YouTube channel of my poetry on social media.

It's true that I only have about 130 Facebook friends, but they would be well aware of how important my poetry is to me. They'd have to be, at this stage. And yet...all but three or four of them took a look at the couple of poetry videos I posted and apparently thought: "That minute-long video is just too much time out of my busy life." (Even constructive criticism would have been welcome.)

It was a haymaker to my morale. I had long harboured the hope that social media might be a way to bypass the free verse gatekeepers that are literary and poetry editors. I thought it possible that people might share such videos, and that my poetry might "circulate" as in the days of Philip Sidney and Thomas Wyatt. I'm embarrassed to admit this now.

(Having said that, a few of my Facebook friends have been extremely kind and encouraging about my poetry, and this has meant the world to me.)

So...how does one conquer Mount Apathy? That is the challenge facing any poet or poetry school today, but especially one that goes in for traditional verse. And certainly the biggest challenge facing Suburban Romanticism.