Poets?

I've come to the very tentative conclusion that in order to write poetry, you absolutely must believe in some form of higher power. You must believe that the words you record or stay up into the night chanting have some significance beyond passing that very night, or tickling certain areas of your brain in lieu of human contact. The lovely poetic imagination is something that sustains, but if there is no higher power, it can have no more comfort to the individual than a hand placed on the shoulder tenderly (and uselessly) in the face of frightening circumstances. The suffering in poetry is kept a level above real suffering; even the grittiest poetry I've read romanticizes self-destruction or the event in question as something inherently beyond. You know: the trampled whore is a holy symbol of innocence lost, the drunk reeling in the gutter a spiritual seeker--a Buddha in his own right, and so on. If a realist brand of poetry ever chose to disregard that implicit Deism, or Pantheism, or whatever, it would become indistinguishable from journalism. I struggle with that on my pseudo-intellectual high horse, but if we just open up the neocortex and look under at the limbic system, there is no paradox at all. The unbeliever and egoist can enjoy the poetry and feel the music without interference from the Chaos Within.

Art will save the world. That is an intuitive claim. All forms of art push is in the direction of the more humane, whether gently or shockingly. And it will not do so by reason; reason will do the real work of saving the world, but without an emotional input--without the quiet intensity of a musical piece, or a funeral hymn, or an installation art piece, or a paly mocking the powerful--mediated by art, our science will turn entirely to weapons and money and shameless careerism withour concern for what is too far. Art is ritual in more acceptable form; since we can't abide religion (or choose exactly which one), we'll settle for the broad artistic approach. Maybe art will not save the world, but it must try.

Quote from a seven-year-old: "Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, and then he wears it every day."