2019 Q2 FEATURED POET: RHETT NOLAND

If there is no place within modern society for poetry, then there is no place for me. 

Modern day culture is built on an altar of worship to the immediate. We can all fall to sacrificing ourselves for the instantaneous scratch of our itch for validation. Never has it been easier to fool and lose ourselves. We are now just a follow, swipe, headline, ad, or post away from our favorite flavor of distraction. 

We have allowed ourselves to become rewired and focused on devices that make us appear relevant for the blink of an eye. The cost is truly knowing who we are becoming at the expense our own inner peace. If the society we have built fosters a climate we cannot inhabit then perhaps we have abandoned some of the art forms that still hold true and serve as an honest mirror to reality. 

Poetry is a sacred vehicle that, for thousands of years, has served as a means of exploration and expression of what it is to exist. Through engagement with poetry we unlock transcendent distillations, however blunt or abstract, that magnetize us towards the truth of who we are as a people. To see any valuable return in anything we must invest. Poetry requires us to unearth a shovelful of ourselves so that it may show us the makeup of the ground beneath our feet. Poetry is a gateway beneath the surface of ourselves that will take us as deep as the patience we give it. 

There is great risk in speaking the truth. Poetry serves as an artistic banner for those willing to take that risk. Offering up words that form the shape of our souls to serve as a reflection even if it means being ignored or spat on.    

Poetry has given me a home inside my own head when I have been ready to sell the whole block. It has shown me hope in the mess of my mind and guts when no other man-made means offered it. 

Society will continue to blockade the avenues of truth because it cannot sell its new tricks to those who are no longer fooled. We must continue to seek, ask, and risk greatly. We must create, and write, and write, and write! Poetry will enlighten those whom we dare to reach with our words.

So then, if modern society has no place for poetry then it has no room for the truth and certainly no space for me. 

But time is not yet fulfilled, and we still have breath so this can be changed one word and mind at a time.

Poetry will not die, nor will I, for the landscape it encompasses is an internal shore whose spirit will find refuge beyond the ways we know.

RHETT’S POEM ‘TRAINWRECK’

CAN BE FOUND ON P.26 OF THE QUARTERLY.

FULL TEXT OF THE POEM BELOW.

LEARN MORE ABOUT RHETT’S FIRST BOOK:

TRAIN WRECK

there are no stars in a train wreck
only casualties
the general public loves the tear of tickets
and a strong jaw
to be the fixer-upper
in a super-human swoop of might
reversing what the masses have brought
upon their own hides
but this time
there will be no pseudonym emblemed
on the boulevard
or a leading role with a poster for a face
and virtuous, swooning quips that save
only a thirsty engine pummeling
a brazen locomotive straight through

ripping pages of a half-baked screenplay
and a leviathan gulping down
the echoes of a bad actor’s
war cry

Rhett Noland

Rhett Noland is a musician and writer who found artistic refuge in Nashville in 2011 from the scorching plains of Texas. Rhett tours full time playing drums for Capitol recording artist and rapper NF. Rhett also releases music under his own name that is available on all music platforms. Rhett self published a collection of poetry in his first book "Few and Far Between" in the spring of 2019.