Dragons at the Gates
Contemporary poetry is obsessed with distinctiveness, novelty, strangeness—its own warped perception of originality. As with any art form unfortunate enough to be institutionalized by the dull, unimaginative bureaucrats and critics who so often find themselves as gatekeepers of the arts, there exists the sort of guarded jealousy one might expect of a fire-breathing dragon over one’s use of metaphor.
God forbid a budding poet use a popular metaphor—regardless of how adeptly that poet spins it, or how uniquely they express what many literary gatekeepers might dismiss as “common.” It is the height of sacrilege, no doubt, that any metaphor, turn of phrase, or singular word might grace the pen of more than one poet in the expansive history of mankind. Should that occur, the offender is surely a hack, a poser, a creative black hole incapable of original thought.
Such a poet should be condemned for the grave sin of liking a “familiar” string of words. That poet should be strung up on that same string for all to see.
This logic would doubly condemn the painter whose silhouettes even remotely resemble those of anyone else who has ever picked up a brush—who dares adopt a color palette with even one shade not invented by their own painterly hand—lest they be forever known as a copycat.
The same goes for the stylist who brings shame upon the whole industry by sewing a stitch in the same fashion as a tailor a hundred years ago, or for putting something seemingly inoffensive on a dress—sequins, a bold slash of red, a bit of denim—running the risk of being branded a thief, a stealer of ideas.
For once an unsuspecting human has an idea—sparked by some unknown yet certainly separate source of divine creativity—that idea must be patented, sealed away in an underground vault deep beneath the Earth, and hidden behind closed doors out of fear that someone else among the eight billion of us might just have the same idea.
Because in a world where ideas are dying, we must cling to the few we have left as though they were precious drops of water in a vast, scorching desert.
And oh, how thirsty we have become.
