There Are No Snakes In Ireland                                     

Thomas Rain Crowe

 

“Of course it disturbs me to be misunderstood and finally all but invisible in my own country. But I can remember a time when I had an audience I could count on the fingers of one hand. I was perfectly prepared for that. I still am.” -Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

 

 

In Ireland, the orthodox Catholics say the snakes were run out of the country by the spell of a patron saint. The scientists (geologists, biologists) say that Ireland was isolated in the last Ice Age by glaciation, killing off the snakes which never found their way back again across the Irish Sea from the mainland of the British Isles. Whichever story one chooses to embrace, the fact remains that there are no snakes in Ireland. Just as, for a time in the not too distant past, there were no poets.

 

            It was a long while after the snakes had disappeared from Ireland that the bards were chased out of their own country due to the fact that they were treated so well by the populace (by decree they were to be fed and given board in exchange for their spoken verse and songs) that being a “bard” became quite the in thing to do for those without income or a visible means of support. “If in doubt, become a bard,” was the underclass cliché of the day. And soon both the elite and the would-be middle class got their fill of silly songsters and copycat coupletists in search of a free Guinness and a leg of lamb. With this kind of cultural plague spreading like a virus across the land, and with the people and the powers that be united, they drew up a new decree that drove all bards, authentic and otherwise, from the land-- ending what amounted to a welfare state for would-be poets.

 

            Meanwhile, here in the States a similar sort of hoax was being born. Instead of coming out of the ranks of the disenfranchised and the unemployed, it came from the privileged and educated classes, and out of academia.

 

            With the rise of the leisure class and as a result of the myth of the “American dream” and its campaign promise for a shorter work week and a leisure class economy and culture, a new wave of interest was focused on the arts. As the arts in America became fashionable, so did the desire for those in academia, as well as those of privilege, to themselves, dabble in the arts. Since writing deceptively seemed to take less materials and natural talent than the other disciplines, poetry and prose became de rigeur, en classe for those who truly had neither talent nor a lack of time. Long before the late 1940s and 1950s when it was babies the American masses were cranking out, poetry was sucking up ink.

 

            A century or more later, in a world plagued with over-population, when 50% of all those who read poetry in this country are “poets,” and where less than 1% read at all-- I was reminded of the story of the Irish exodus of the bards recently during a visit by the Irish poet Eavan Boland to the mountains of North Carolina, where there just happens to be an over-abundance of (even poisonous) snakes. From her recollections of the stories in her own country of both the disappearance of the snakes and the bards, I begin to see distressing present day similarities here in our own culture.

 

            In Ireland while the myth of the snake is debated by the Church vs. Academia, in America the battle over the issue of what is not “Poetry” is being fought in relative silence-- on the page, with “housewives and horsehusbands of the muse” popping up like the Irish bards of old.

 

            With over four hundred small presses and countless small literary magazines in this country, and with several thousand “poets” documented in print, one can hardly tell the wheat from the chaff. And it would take more winnowing than the 1% of the population who does still read would be willing to do to come up with a bowl of “pure grain.” “Poetry” and “poets” are everywhere. Under every rock. To become a card carrying “poet,” all one has to do these days is enroll in any number of MFA programs across the country. In these programs, anyone and everyone seeking literary credibility as a quick fix for a loss of self-esteem, can spend several thousand dollars and in a few weekends become a so-called poet. This current trend-- which has not only diluted the quality of what once passed for belles-lettres but has, like the real estate market in good times, kept natives from being able to afford land in their own towns, likewise making it nearly impossible for profound and gifted poets to publish-- runs parallel with the current craze and fascination with “shamanism” in our culture. The trend that sees great numbers of the population chasing after workshops to become “Medicine Men,” “Medicine Women” overnight.

            As with the traditional indigenous shaman, so should it be with respect to the process of becoming a Poet-- a lifelong apprenticeship to both craft and muse, and taken on only by those deemed destined for the role. Initiation should be more a matter of sensibility than study. More a matter of destiny than whim. As if the process of literary reception and transmission (what I refer to as “radiogenesis”) could be taught! Who was it that taught Cocteau’s Orpheus to work the dials of the old car radio out in the garage to access the voice of his poems? Who was it taught Yeats to write “Second Coming.” Who taught Rimbaud to write the breakthrough verse that would become A Season In Hell? Who could have taught Dylan Thomas to write the kind of lyrics that would become 18 poems? Who taught Bob Kaufman to write the “Abominust Manifesto” and “Second April?” The answer to these questions is: no one. To write as these pure poets wrote was not something they learned from spending a couple summers on a university campus as part of and MFA Program. Nothing that hey learned in school made them the poets they were to become. They just naturally, genetically and organically, found themselves there, in that place, as poets. As did Orpheus-- leaping in and out of bed with Eurydice between visits to the car.

           

            The true poet is called on, not culled out. The true poet is not the product of teaching, rather the product of sweet torture and terrible flight. The poet is the “pure snake.” Or as Yeats says in A Vision: “When the candle was burnt out. An honest man did not pretend that grease was flame.”

           

            In this country, now, as it was in Ireland more than a century ago, the snake (the Poet) is hard to find. Driven out of his country as a result of cultural lethargy, Hollywood, and the Information Super-Highway, he lies hidden at the bottom of the lake. Buried in the malaise of the mud. And as the bards in Ireland multiplied like rabbits during the Great Famine, so have the American versifiers flooded the countryside, the markets, and the street-corners with their hollow tunes. They are the blind leading the blind. They are the water in milk. They are the broken tubes in the radio of radiogenesis. They are the aphrodisiacs of the dream.

           

            And as it was in Ireland, maybe it is now time, here, in this country, to do away with the over-population of “poets.” To separate the wheat from the chaff. To give power back to whom power belongs. To be rid of the collective voice of mediocrity and indulgent self promotion. I feel we are not, today, far from finding ourselves in the predicament of Eavan Boland’s post-medieval Ireland. The answers to our questions of spirituality and survival are buried somewhere in the mountains of information. Mountains of chaff. These answers, this work, is the domain of the true Healers, of the real Poets.

 

            Is it time to clean house? I think so. All that remains to be determined is who it will be that will lead this mass exodus. An exodus that will clean the cultural slate once and for all until such time that the true American bards will, in the words of Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Aengus,” find their way back to these American shores and “pluck ‘til time and times are done, the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.”