Canaries
in the American Coal Mine

Coleridge called them the legislators of mankind. They’re also the consciences of mankind. And the seers.

They being the poets, whom we shall always have with us.

Imperfect legislators, consciences, and seers, still, over the long curve of time and history, they legislate, moralize, and see more fairly and clearly than any other group of human beings.

How could they not, being usually bereft of money, with their only reward coming from the applause in heaven (if that).

These last decades, as in fiction, painting, sculpture, music, theater, dance, we’ve been in something of a dark age of poetry: self-centered, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, self-regretting.

The omphaloskeptic age of poetry.

The ouroborotic age of poetry.

An age, to be sure, not without some hard-won truths and some hard-bit poets who persevered. But then, how could they not? The born poet has nothing to do but write poetry; the rest is fiddle-dee-dee.

Which brings us to Magellan’s Log, with its over-the-top quota of fiddle-dee-dee. Much of it (he said, immodestly) is high-quality fiddle-dee-dee, but still.

Some lately, their eye fixed on the bottom line, have berated us in editorial for the sudden outpouring of what some refuse even to call by name but choose to refer to only as "p----y."

Those berating profiteers, blinded as ever by Mammon, don’t realize that we might be just as astonished as they by this outpouring of "p----y."

In seven years, after all, Magellan’s Log has built up a huge global readership—NOT through "p----y" but through clever, sometimes serious, sometimes satirical, reactions to goings-on in the world.

And here, suddenly, in the face of that ephemeral (if also fun and funny) success we throw down the anti-profit AND anti-success gauntlet of, well, "p----y."

Who, we agree with the profiteers, reads poetry anymore?

It matters, of course, a lot, the fact that nobody reads the stuff anymore. But not just in the money-way that the profiteers mean.

Far more presciently and forebodingly, the non-read condition of "p----y" matters because poets, like it or not, are—in extremis—canaries in the old cultural coal mine.

They sing, and though no one pays attention, their singing is part of the warp and woof of life in the mine. And what if, one day, abruptly their singing increases in volume and urgency… and then ceases altogether?

Eh?

The canaries are there for a purpose.

If suddenly the care-worn canaries of Magellan’s Log find themselves feeling that further satire is useless, further rational analysis is useless, then maybe, my friends, we are a whole lot worse off than we think.