Poetry is doomed

In the Guardian newspaper, on the 27th of December 2008, Nick Laird talks about the struggle of creating beautiful poetry when the world seems to be ending in a number of different ways.

In Ireland last week I heard on RTE that back in October the world was only two hours from economic meltdown - money would have stopped coming out of ATMs, credit cards would have stopped working and society would rapidly break down. We sidestepped that - though economies have collapsed. All that, however, is as nothing compared to the ecological collapse. There's a kind of constant free-floating global anxiety at this time. Anything I try to write turns elegiac, as if elegy is the only appropriate tone. So much bad news. The earth is, to put it mildly, f***ed. Climate change. Rising seas. Mass extinctions. The destruction of fish stocks, rainforests. The Gulf Stream stopping. The earth is turning against us. I spent hours online last night reading how the bees are dying out. And what happened to bird flu?

Art is waist-deep in the spirit of the times and the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, given the turbine hall at Tate Modern, has aimed to present "a postapocalyptic world 50 years in the future". She has filled the space with recreations of sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman and others, and placed them among a grid of mattress-less metal bunk beds, where books such as The War of the Worlds and Fahrenheit 451 have been left. It's common enough to play Chicken Licken, to claim that the end of the world is nigh, but I've read my Stern report, my Lovelock, my Rachel Carson and John Gray, and I can't help feeling it too. What does poetry do in these circumstances? There is satire, but that seems such a hollow posture. In modern nature poetry - perhaps in modern poetry itself - the elegiac tone has come to be the dominant mode, the pervasive mood. Didn't Martin Amis once claim that the modern world meant the only appropriate fiction was comic? It seems in poetry the only tone left is elegiac.