Dead Poet’s Society and the Birth of Anarchy – A Review

Dead poets bleed literature
Though they be bloodless and food for worms.
Literature is anarchy.
Literature is counterculture.

Not all fiction, not all poetry, is literature.
There exists safety and there exists fringe.
Fringe calls safety to the edge
To feel the calling of the breeze,
To enjoy the air beneath the toes
As they play above the empty drop into God knows what.
Safety calls fringe away
To move its dangling toes from the rock,
To be more stable against the roaring winds
That threaten to pull into the abyss.
Art hears both,
But art’s blood listens to the blood of the dead,
Of those who bore and bear maggots,
Bloodless save for the words remembered.

Fringe is danger; it
Subverts,
Usurps,
Invades,
Infects.

When you embrace art,
You can't see the world the same way anymore,
You become part of the underground
Filled with danger
And wonder
And new experiences
And smushing out the chalk lines around limits.

Some call it escape.
Some call it fantasy.
Some call it relaxation even.
Art changes the reader.

Period.

Like fire creates heat
Art creates change,
Sometimes subtle,
Sometimes loud and abrasive;

Art pushes, pushes, pushes the status quo.
Art demands, demands the reader question mores and morals.
Rules and parents and governments and priests and assumptions and doctrines,
Casting all ascriptions, all measurements, all things held true, aside,
Burying them in the dark dirt of an Indian cave and rewriting them,
And rewriting them again.
And rewriting them again.

Art creates martyrs and disciples,
Art preaches,
Art coerces and drags and envelopes and antagonizes,
And, in turn, that same art shapes students into disciples
Who must study and worship in secret
Because art makes them weird and dangerous.

Art builds a sort of First Century Church,
Holding vigil away from the eyes of the Roman Empire;
Art defines its own religious affection,
Having in its domain emotion and imagination and action and belief.

Its message,
Its edict,
Its offer to come and die:
“Make your lives extraordinary.”
Reduced, almost mantra-like, to carpe diem,
Seize the day—
Live! Damn it, live!
Give the worm something worthy to feast on.
—Jesus warning that faith tears families asunder,
Turn fathers against sons.

But faith,
All faith,
Old faith,
New faith,
This faith,
Has consequences, martyrdom real and figurative, a dream and a waking;

Like any true faith, somebody has to die—
Someone has to believe it that strongly
—Like any true faith, it perseveres,
Desks groaning and shifting on the classroom floor,
Beginning, as all rites in all new religions do,
Weighting and buckling beneath the feet of believers,
Heavy and dangerous in their throaty exultations:

"Oh Captain! my Captain!"

2022