"The world goes on despite us and our poems."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notwithstanding

 by Catherine Chandler

“The world goes on despite us and our poems.”

                ― David Mason (from his poem “Winter 1963”)

 

 

Keyboard strokes replace the fountain pen

and voices yield to verses on the page―

so have the poets sung from age to age

devoted to their vital art. 

                                                         But when

the audience for truth and beauty fades,

replaced by fandom of a looser form

whose stale epiphanies become the norm;

and AI scatters reams of ready-mades;

when deconstruction proves it vain to find

meaning; when an old philosophy

conjectures on the use of poetry

as pure abstraction of an idle mind,

I offer up a faithful antiphon

although the world goes on. And on. And on.

 

 

 

 [First published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, September 2024]