THE INVISIBLE COMBAT
[The overall title of this collection has been changed. It used to be 'Poems of Regeneration', which had a disagreeable fascistic ring to it. This introduction has been slightly altered accordingly]
When Marshall MacLuhan wrote that 'the medium is the message', I believe his intention was to warn against modern media. The fact that his work was almost universally received as a glorification of modern media is proof of the truth of what he was saying: the medium is as powerful as the message to be conveyed. Indeed, and I assume that this was what is meant by the variant, ' the medium is the massage', it is considerably more powerful. It undermines the message.
A television programme about the craft of pottery is a glorification of the television, not of the pottery. The real experience is 'televisual', not tactile, nor even in any properly developed sense, optical. A website celebrating art, the love of God, poetry, even politics, remains just that: a website. Art, the love of God, poetry and even politics, are to do with life, which is to say, with human experience, consciousness - body, soul and spirit. You, hypocritical reader, my brother, my twin, are at present living in and interacting with a world of dead things, of bits, and pixels.
These poems, then, will only properly evoke their subject matter - the Invisible Combat - if they turn you in a direction that is the opposite of the direction in which you, like me, are, right at this very moment, facing.
Poems by Peter Brooke (with new sections added October 2009) Poems by Walter Firpo (in French) - this has been long delayed but will begin to appear soon, honest.