WTWN #96 - How to Defeat Entropy

Most of our energy is expended to stall or attempt to defeat entropy.

When I first began pursuing my MFA in poetry in 2018, I had a vague idea for a thesis. The original idea never materialized but was part of a journey toward something related, yet still quite different.

My original idea was something about the essence of psychological time, something I called the poetic present—i.e., what happened in the mind of the reader as they read, and how that was equal to or superior to anything someone might call the present or even the real in the world outside the person’s head.

The existence of this poetic present was a path towards immortality, because one could master it to remain alive in words even after one could not do so in body. If it were a painting instead of a poem, you might call it the “Ghost on the Canvas,” to steal the title of a Glen Campbell song written by Paul Westerberg.

To illustrate my thesis, I even had a poem by Mark Strand in mind, which I felt demonstrated the idea. But I was never able to find that elusive poem again, even after flipping through Strand’s complete collected works. Memory is fallible.

Reflecting on this idea now, it seems to resemble, to some extent, the virtual human minds, voices, and visages that are being made possible by AI.

I have encountered similar poems, but never one quite as perfect as this to illustrate my point. For example, Strand’s poem “The Untelling” dances around the idea, but at the same time obfuscates it by stressing how unreachable such an external, objective reality is and how fully words, in themselves, fail as a means of transport to get there. Words tend to dissolve what they try to capture.

Excuse the massive pivot.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to write out this difficult-to-defend argument, because an MFA thesis in poetry is not an extended essay about poetics, but a manuscript of poems. And as I wrote the poems, what emerged was an entirely different theme.

My theme was entropy: the natural inclination over time of things in the universe—all things—to move from states of order to states of disorder (in a closed system, anyway, one in which energy is not exerted on the things from the outside). I.e., poof—without the existence of God, the whole eventually goes to hell. Sound familiar?

Entropy encapsulates the death of species, the end of stars and solar systems, and ultimately the universe itself—a vast enough subject to keep me busy my whole life, especially as I watch “The Entropy Show” take place around and inside me.

To get to the point of this essay, last month, I had a poem that gets to the heart of this revised thesis published in the “Chaos” issue of Consilience, a peer-reviewed Scottish literary magazine.

The short version of the argument is that in the face of inevitable death, we are still here to make the most of it. To enjoy! To thrive in the face of doom.

This essay serves as an extended introduction to the poem. Many poets don’t comment when asked if they have anything to say about a poem before reading one, since a well-written poem should stand on its own.

In this poem, I managed to touch on the religious and spiritual, while skirting the scientific.

Did the people who wrote the religious books of the world understand entropy? Without a doubt.

Maybe entropy is the reason man invented God.

Here’s the poem. For publication in Consilience, it was retitled “How to Defeat Chaos."

https://www.consilience-journal.com/issue-21-how-to-defeat-chaos

Who knows how, but I’m still here.

David