Café Philos: an internet café

It’s my moral duty to caution you right up front that I’m fixin’ to explain a poem. Of course, if I do it right, then I will have made the poem, its song and magic, easy accessible to you, thus increasing your enjoyment of the poem — and perhaps of life itself — and consequently earning your undying gratitude which, no doubt, you will express by naming your first born after me. That’s if I do it right.

Fat chance I’ll do it right.

On the other hand, if I do it wrong, the result will be akin to destroying a beautiful flower by dissecting it with the cold steel of scalpel and tweezers. That is, if I do it wrong, you might end up with a new understanding of the poem, but the poem will forever ring dead to you.

I am determined to give it a try despite the risk. The fact is, nowadays, there is arguably more need for good critiques of poems than for poems. That’s because very few of us any longer have the time to tease out the meaning and beauty of poetry on our own. A good critique can save us hours of work — hours we don’t have — but there aren’t that many good critiques out there. So, I’m going to take a shot at writing a good critique.

Since this is my first effort at critiquing a poem, and it is very likely to produce a mess, I think I should critique one of my own poems rather than risk butchering someone else’s. After this, there will be plenty of opportunity to wretchedly critique other people’s poems. But please, please wish me luck this first time around!

Let’s get started, then. Anyone who has read Joseph Campbell’s studies of mythology might come to the realization that every culture or society embodies in its myths a view of human nature. A view that answers the questions people in that culture or society have about what it means to be human, what our place in the world is, why we are here, and so on.

Yet, we ourselves live in an age that has no settled, predominate view of human nature. Instead, we have many views of human nature — some traditional, many new — which often conflict with each other. Indeed, you can trace the deepest divisions in contemporary politics back to fundamentally conflicting views of human nature.

Should men and women be political, economic, and social equals? It all depends on your view of human nature. Should abortion be legal? Again, it depends on your view of human nature. Is consumerism good for us? Depends on what you think our nature is. World wide, societies and cultures are being politically divided along lines that correspond to how people fundamentally view human nature.

My poem, Throw Your Rockets Far, is a tiny drop in the ocean of debate over human nature. In the poem, I see in Aaron, an eight year old child, how human nature is grounded in the past, in the history of human evolution:

Somewhere we hear the shorebird’s cry
From a beach in Africa we never left.
Somewhere we are shaman, warrior, gatherer,
Women and men intimate with our past.

“Somewhere we are shaman, warrior, gatherer” — but where exactly is that “somewhere”?

The place where we are even today a “shaman, warrior, gatherer” is not a location apart from us, but rather “somewhere” in our own heart and mind. The poem asserts we are still our ancestors; that we still approach the world as a shaman, warrior, or gatherer; which are some of the traditional roles of our evolutionary ancestry.

Moreover, the poem implies we are still, even today, more at home in those traditional roles than we might recognize:

Somewhere we walk in the yellow grass;
The sky huge, but our feet owning each step.

“Our feet owning each step”. When some 5500 years ago, we left our traditional hunting/gathering lifestyle to build and live in cities, did we also leave behind the experience of being completely at home in our environment, completely adapted to our world through ages of evolution? If the poem raises that question, then how does it answer it? Well, let’s read the poem as a whole now:

I shall not tell you Aaron at eight
Somewhere we walk in the yellow grass;
The sky huge, but our feet owning each step.
Somewhere we hear the shorebird’s cry
From a beach in Africa we never left.
Somewhere we are shaman, warrior, gatherer,
Women and men intimate with our past.

No, I shall not tell you Aaron at eight
What at eight you simply feel
On your lawn at dusk when you throw a bottle rocket
With a warrior’s grace — and hard at the moon.

The poem suggests that we can witness in children the spontaneous expression of our evolutionary past. Aaron does not need to think, “I am a warrior”, but he echoes a warrior’s grace in something as simple as throwing a bottle rocket. That’s to say, Aaron is at home and at ease with his ancestor’s role of warrior. And, if that is true, then the poem would suggest Aaron — and by extension, the rest of us — are at least in some ways still the remarkable hunting/gathering ape that evolved so long ago on the continent of Africa.

The poem thus constitutes one answer to the question, “What is human nature”.

Ok, folks, that’s my first ever critique of a poem. I intend from time to time on this blog to present you with other critiques — mostly of other people’s poems. Now, I would appreciate it if you could give me some helpful feedback on how well I’ve done with my first critique? Did I butcher the poem for you or help with your appreciating it? Was the critique worth your while?