A Fresh Poem: "A Small Defiance"

And for those who would like, a few words about it.

Albert Bierstadt, “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie,” oil on canvas, 1866

Dear friend,

All is well here, though the busy season of the year is upon me. The hours are quick and the days are short. The dawn is coming late and the dark early. Much of my personal writing time is presently being spent in finalizing The Locust Years. I will have some very fun sneak peeks coming soon … with some treats and the opportunity to preorder with some VERY wonderful bonuses (those who remember the preorder perks for Bower Lodge will have a hint, but we’re doing even more).

Here is a fresh poem for you, and a recording of me reading it, with some thoughts on it below for my (very kind)

paid subscribers.

-Paul

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A Small Defiance
Paul J. Pastor

The manufacturers of empty thoughts,
Whose pillow is the coin, whose bed the cloud,
Have massed themselves, arrayed in endless clots,
Have mustered out the tedious and loud,

But I defy them, in their vast display,
To touch me, in my body or my head,
And to them, I gather my will to say
That I shall live, though their whole world fall dead.

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Ours is a time of many crises. They present differently, but for me, they all seem to overlap in an uncanny and growing feeling that there is something large and horrible that wishes to diminish people, to weaken our thought, spirit, and relationships in order to better use us for its own ends or enrichment. (Or to eat us.) This feeling is larger than movements of Right or Left, larger than religion (though I will heartily recommend my sacramental Christianity as possibly the only long-term antidote to the thing), and fundamentally against us. It is everywhere, or seems to want us to think that it is everywhere. It wears public figures, companies, ideologies, and Big Ideas like finger puppets. It is, probably, the Spirit of the Age.

Under that dark influence, we find ourselves live in a time where human dignity and the human capacity to be free are being eroded in terms whose stakes are absolutely basic. There is no quarter of human life where what it means to be free (or “human”) is not being challenged. Explosive violence, of action, word, and thought, is everywhere. The interests driving this erosion and this explosion are corporate in expression, but spiritual in nature. They are organized, well-funded, political (but not partisan, as all that comes later), and seem to have as their object the commodification, cheapening, flattening, and control of every aspect of human thought, culture, life, and society. (For a thoughtful in-depth description of this, do go read Paul Kingsnorth’s series of essays on The Machine if you have not.) No matter who we are, there is a version of this influence positioned to tempt us—to use its own horrible tools to fight one or another of its other finger puppets.

In all of this, the Real is being replaced by the Pretend, the Gift by the Transaction, and the Full by the Empty. Do you feel it too? It is everywhere, and while this is a saying that every generation has felt true, I am not sure if there have ever been times quite like these.

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A poem is one of the great paradoxes of art. It is so small and quick. And yet into that tiny burst of distilled language may be placed a very strong thought—a thought that may get into the head or heart of another, and do something there. A line from George Herbert’s The Temple comes to mind:

“A Verse may find him whom a Sermon flies,

And turn delight into a Sacrifice.”

A decent poem is efficient. Very few works of art are so economic. By way of analogy, think of carrying about a sack of raw grain. The weight! The volume! Now picture that same grain reduced to mash for whisky, then distilled time and again to its spirit, then put to rest in an oaken barrel where the angels draw off their measure as water continues to evaporate. In the end, much of that sack of grain may be put in a little hip flask or poured in two snifters for a friend to toast his friend. It has given its gift, by means of concentration, care, and loss. I often say in interviews or conversation that while many people think of poetry as the milk of literature, it is in fact the whiskey—distilled, crafted, and strong, the product of time and a long tradition. It may be an acquired taste for some, and that is fine. But the good stuff is worth sitting with and contemplating.

Because of this efficiency, a decent poem has leverage. Surprisingly large things may be lifted by it. Whole lives have been lifted by a single good poem; whole families. So have nations, languages, and civilizations. This leverage is real. It inheres in the power of language to move a person. Something like the famous hypothetical lever of Archimedes, if you can find the right place to set a poem, you can move the world, even if only a little.