A Creeping Suspicion

First off this is just a short note which I want to think through further. I am a little afraid to publish it but also it has been creeping around in my mind for a while and I want to at least unblock the dialogue.

A lot of poetry has become really subjectively localised and fairly narcissistic, as in resolved to not go on beyond itself / the self that composes it - the poet as a kind of deflated subordinate against the world. I think one reason for this is a very understandable suspicion of speaking on behalf of others or even posturing. However, I see this strand of writing really closing itself and its contemporaries down and I feel it comes from on the one hand a very fearful place. Fear from the rise of hate crimes. The pressure of austerities. Colossal uncertainty. I feel it also rises out of a latent and harmful pressure to testify. What use are you if you are not testifying to your own subjective pain? That kind of very harmful pressure that is so horribly present in the assumptions of roles for marginalised artists. "Can you tell us all about your journey?" etc. The personal as political but with the "personal" horribly fetishised. A kind of axiomatic totality of selfless. I also see it as a reaction against certain strands of poetry that have been historically difficult and inaccessible. However, I think this opens up a new zone of exclusion - another aesthetic blocking point. A friend recently described a lot of the poetry at a reading as similar to snippets of social media posts interspersed with responses to certain books of theory. The most suspicious part of me wants to name this as a turn away from the kinds of ambitious scope of poetics in terms of speaking about really really terrifying and impossible things for the reasons detailed above, but something that can easily be steered or steer itself into mere personal ambition; a place where a different kind of posturing can grow. What happens when poets decide only to speak for or with themselves.