The Last Poet: The Memoirs of Whale, Including His Selected Poetry (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798387650253)

The Last Poet is a speculative novel on an artist's purpose. After environmental disasters and nuclear war destroy the planet, survivors emerge from an underground shelter in the community of Independence. With the end of civilization, and without the technology and food of the past, without books, the town recreates a primitive society led by a few scientists who worked on the Jean Project, themselves dying off; the community is mainly concerned with procreation, as its numbers fall.

Whale was a "test tube baby," engineered by the "guardians," created to withstand climate change. He was born just before the holocaust, the last of three-hundred children. After the nuclear war, all bets were off. Two years after the bombs and radiation, the community emerges from underground into a dead landscape each wearing synthetic survival suits.
Nearly forty years later, Whale is dying and writes his memoir, not knowing if anybody will even read his story, let alone care about his poetry and legacy.

In his imagination, he prepares for his final "pilgrimage" to the summit of Mt. Inyo, a volcanic massive looming over Independence and a metaphor for transcendence. He is a poet; therefore, an "inward" person; it's in his DNA, but what use is poetry now? Any literary tradition is gone, the words are gone, and all that survives several thousand years of language are fragments remembered by a few scientists, the "guardians"-themselves empiricists and uninterested in art. Survival is all now.

Whale is a nature poet of landscapes in a decimated world and must use his imagination to write his obscure poetry. Though he serves as the town's poet laureate, he mainly commemorates the births and advances of his town's banal existence. His memoir includes the beautiful and expansive poetry of the inner world he created during his life.

He gives insights into his thinking, creativity, and spirituality-his inwardness and profound response to the human and natural catastrophes around him and why art matters even in a near-meaningless world.

Author: Phil Semler
ISBN-13: 9798387650253
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 03/19/2023
Pages: 258
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.54d