Old thoughts on Poetics
A Poetics
“There is a time when we know what poetry is so well that we cannot define it in other words, even as we cannot define the taste of coffee, the color of red, or of yellow, the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, of the sunrise, of the sunset, of our love for our country. Those things are so deep in us that they can only be expressed with those common symbols that we share. So why should we need other words?”
-Jorge Luis Borges
1.16.2004
I believe in story. I believe in lyric, that we can sing. I believe that poetry is a conscious attempt at communication, rooted in the emotional turmoil of our lives, and in our search for the eternal, the spiritual. I believe that the intellectual aspect of poetry is in the ordering of those emotions and in the way we approach the page, the way that we order the page. A line is a unit of rhythm and a unit of meaning. I believe that form should free, and can, and does. I believe that writing is composing and that composing is as deep as worship in us. We divine through the mechanisms of language. Language is historical, it means only in its procession, but rooted in that procession is all of the knowledge and emotion of all of those who have created with it as it has evolved. Their knowledge and emotion forced its evolution. So I mean in a historical context, always capable of saying new, always refining what is, already.
2.2.2005
Poetry is the inflation of events (narrative/lyric) or realizations (lyric) with significance/meaning. This inflation, this jump to the fuller world, is what allows the art to happen. This is close, if not synonymous with mythmaking.
Because identification of speaker/voice with the poet is never complete, but also never completely separate, there is always an element of self-mythologizing; in the best poets, this is done consciously. For consciousness precedes art, necessarily (this is the craft/artistic-control element of art). But a leap of the conscious, into the unconscious, is the other necessary element of art.
The inclusion of the unconscious is what is responsible for the “revealing” tendencies of a work of art, while the work of the consciousness, the imposition of the artist’s direction (intent) or rhetorical lattice (form) on the work provides the “concealing” (I like “withholding” better) characteristics of a great work of art. The conflict of these tendencies, the tension between them, is what evokes the power present in a work of art.
I am currently finding the most effective means of making this leap through deep imagism, which a) challenges the writer metaphorically (involving the opportunity for craft, within the vigorous exercise of the unconscious), and b) challenges the reader imagistically (stimulating the most holistic response possible).
3.3.2005
I believe that poetry’s aim is to voice the obscured nature of what is in the world. As individuals of this ‘postmodern’ era, conscious of the way we order the world through our senses and the inherent limits of that ordering, we believe almost wholly in our separateness from the essence of this world which reveals itself to us only as it simultaneously conceals itself. The awareness of this separateness leaves the old gods distant and many of the old myths empty. When myths are employed, or adopted by any larger number of people than one, they become religion and religion becomes political, further separating participants from the world in which they live. And so the role of the poet, as I understand it, is to attempt to peel the layers of the world back for himself, through the struggle of language (which naturally conceals, or empties, even as it depicts), and to create or harness meaning from the revelatory moments he experiences. This is the creation of modern myth in poetry, the attempt at a faithful revision and depiction of what is for the individual, without society’s boundaries of ‘reality’ or ‘illusion’. We each, in our own worlds, exist in our own realities. The poems which spring from the poet’s pen, when truly original, are poems of the poet’s mythology (for what is myth but story, a truth, from a world that is not ours, but whose revelation is familiar?). And although the poems may be products of a distinct mythology, the truths transcribed in them parallel truths which we, as individuals, have experienced or realized ourselves, in degrees.
“There is a time when we know what poetry is so well that we cannot define it in other words, even as we cannot define the taste of coffee, the color of red, or of yellow, the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, of the sunrise, of the sunset, of our love for our country. Those things are so deep in us that they can only be expressed with those common symbols that we share. So why should we need other words?”
-Jorge Luis Borges
1.16.2004
I believe in story. I believe in lyric, that we can sing. I believe that poetry is a conscious attempt at communication, rooted in the emotional turmoil of our lives, and in our search for the eternal, the spiritual. I believe that the intellectual aspect of poetry is in the ordering of those emotions and in the way we approach the page, the way that we order the page. A line is a unit of rhythm and a unit of meaning. I believe that form should free, and can, and does. I believe that writing is composing and that composing is as deep as worship in us. We divine through the mechanisms of language. Language is historical, it means only in its procession, but rooted in that procession is all of the knowledge and emotion of all of those who have created with it as it has evolved. Their knowledge and emotion forced its evolution. So I mean in a historical context, always capable of saying new, always refining what is, already.
2.2.2005
Poetry is the inflation of events (narrative/lyric) or realizations (lyric) with significance/meaning. This inflation, this jump to the fuller world, is what allows the art to happen. This is close, if not synonymous with mythmaking.
Because identification of speaker/voice with the poet is never complete, but also never completely separate, there is always an element of self-mythologizing; in the best poets, this is done consciously. For consciousness precedes art, necessarily (this is the craft/artistic-control element of art). But a leap of the conscious, into the unconscious, is the other necessary element of art.
The inclusion of the unconscious is what is responsible for the “revealing” tendencies of a work of art, while the work of the consciousness, the imposition of the artist’s direction (intent) or rhetorical lattice (form) on the work provides the “concealing” (I like “withholding” better) characteristics of a great work of art. The conflict of these tendencies, the tension between them, is what evokes the power present in a work of art.
I am currently finding the most effective means of making this leap through deep imagism, which a) challenges the writer metaphorically (involving the opportunity for craft, within the vigorous exercise of the unconscious), and b) challenges the reader imagistically (stimulating the most holistic response possible).
3.3.2005
I believe that poetry’s aim is to voice the obscured nature of what is in the world. As individuals of this ‘postmodern’ era, conscious of the way we order the world through our senses and the inherent limits of that ordering, we believe almost wholly in our separateness from the essence of this world which reveals itself to us only as it simultaneously conceals itself. The awareness of this separateness leaves the old gods distant and many of the old myths empty. When myths are employed, or adopted by any larger number of people than one, they become religion and religion becomes political, further separating participants from the world in which they live. And so the role of the poet, as I understand it, is to attempt to peel the layers of the world back for himself, through the struggle of language (which naturally conceals, or empties, even as it depicts), and to create or harness meaning from the revelatory moments he experiences. This is the creation of modern myth in poetry, the attempt at a faithful revision and depiction of what is for the individual, without society’s boundaries of ‘reality’ or ‘illusion’. We each, in our own worlds, exist in our own realities. The poems which spring from the poet’s pen, when truly original, are poems of the poet’s mythology (for what is myth but story, a truth, from a world that is not ours, but whose revelation is familiar?). And although the poems may be products of a distinct mythology, the truths transcribed in them parallel truths which we, as individuals, have experienced or realized ourselves, in degrees.
posted by a. frost at 7:10 PM
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