Blogs are done by enthusiasts who are advocates of the maxim that the best things in life are free. They are created by solo curmudgeons with a thousand opinions, none of whom are hobbled and checked by any censors or viragos of politcal correctness. If one were to write the history of blogs one couldn’t assume in a Darwinian way that  they emanated from one primitive but covertly fecund ur-blog, then gradually became a florally varied phenomenon over long seasons of time, foaling diverse sets of semi-autonomous  savants, all still locked into a watch-like mechanism  growing  like an imaginary invented pyramid.

            The history of anything at all is usually taught as the result of a series of battles or the more tranquil harvests of this phantom upside down triangle in peacetime. Of course such ways of thinking have a neatness and hard-edged mechanical structure to them that is very attractive to us. Is any of it true?

            I can say that any such notion falsifies the observable production of any Art. It’s manufactured by a few improbable makers of it who work alone and are never checked by a committee. Its very advents are abrupt with no intermediate models that lead up to it in any suave euclidean way. One can in the commerce of Art subsequent to its creation  assert that it is produced by schools of bibulous comrades, that one production of it is derived from a previous one, but sad to say that is a lot of hooey  wafted to baffle the gulls of an age, not any science based on observation. The horrible truth is that much and perhaps all originality among us comes to us when we are unprepared for it, perhaps even at least mildly annoyed  by it.

            If we followed the Darwinian model of history we might easily imagine literature without Homer or Shakespeare, music without Mozart or Beethoven, visual arts without Michelangelo or Rembrandt. It’s a description of an imaginary world. There is no place in such theories to account for genius or even  minor originality. Yet observably and luckily we have had Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo and Rembrandt to adorn our mortality. Haply we don’t have to have the same talent for explanation of anything we have for observation of our surroundings.

            Looking within Blogspot at the Unsung Symphonies Site with its with its exploration of music that has never become fashionable  it did occur to me that such a parallel safari might by  made into the history of poetry. As much as I admire  the two authors of this blog for  finding value in unfashionable  fare its analysis never moves beyond a mere description of what seems to be fashionable in listening to classical music.

            It’s unfortunate because  politics and commerce  are the twin spurs of fashion, not  the absolute value if such  a numinous metaphysical quality exists at all. It also assumes falsely that reading is something we humans do together in an assembly. Actually there isn’t a more private act on Earth than being a reader, a viewer, a listener to some form of Art.  Like mushrooms it has no survival value.  Even sex and dying are less solitary than casually taking in a limerick. 

            We are all familiar with  history as a series of battles that have decided who would try to control people and territories, military acts of mass action soldiers do in elaborately organized groups.  To some nothing else is history. Cuddly there be a history of something that occurs alone in a  room with locked doors done by people who can’t even be identified much of the time much less  predicted, a sober analysis of  any Art  that would have the objectivity and precision in its results that might be comparable to the steely resonances of the battle of Hastings or Waterloo?

            I’m not even sure that any battle or revolution was quite what historians who like neatness and decisive  force in their thought think they were. What happens after a battle to the survivors of it? The winners try to enslave or exterminate  the losers in some way. Then the losers tend to evade such control or shuffle off to some other place, perhaps my own country.

            Certainly the United States is a nation that has one set of people trying to rule it, another, often people of color, women,  or having some other element in them that  denies then any legitimacy, fashioning the culture in spite of whatever despotism had been or still is in front of everybody. We might  look at American history as the successful founding of a culture by Afro-Americans, Jews, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and women along with violent mavericks in  the Wild West, only slightly hobbled by whoever was in charge of the government at the time. All governments are, in spite of themselves, limited governments. Culture can have a contagion unknown to the art of rule. 

            Applying such  tools to a history of American poetry, can we imagine  its existence without Freneau, Poe, Whitman, Sandberg, Stephan Crane, Joaquin Miller, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath? We could certainly write such a fictional history but we would have trouble getting anyone to pay attention to it.

            We value poetry not as a parade down a street of soldiers and clerks in the dung-strewn boulevards of history but an arena in which some very improbable  people have enriched us with the unknown. They couldn’t have done it had they been accountants or clerks lurking in an office.  

            Commerce and  despotism, even Academic criticism,  for different reasons have no interest in anything that can’t be defined, controlled, ladled out in volume like cornflakes with some claims to objectivity and copiability. For that reason alone all three fields claiming to be master of reality are going to be enemies of any honest science examining poetry.  

            Yet in certain ways culture anywhere is powerful enough to  ignore such analytics from various mahatmas at the top. Politics can only give legitimacy or lack of it to any popular human action.  Of course it’s to the purpose of  any autocratic movement to try to replace these improbable singularities of Nature with synthetic travesties of the  seemingly miraculous phenomenon.

            That’s why in my lifetime we’ve had white-bread impostors like Pat Boone, Rickey Nelson, the Monkees, in rock music. It might  also be why many authentic talents in rock music like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison mysteriously perished.