2. “To idealize [here I’m quoting Martin Amis from a recent essay in The Guardian]: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed values of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.”
Sounds admirably pure. But is the language of creativeness really all that different from the learned porridge we serve in the academy? Well, yes and no. No, as every creative linguistic expression should obviously always be an inventive effort at using the known or the understood to propose more applicable or transforming concepts. Yes, since poetry is a precise and tactile tongue, even though it can be called ‘universal’ because it always speaks poetry, irrespective of the language it inhabits or hides in. “Poetry is my mother tongue.” (Yang Liang)
Visual art is a language with its own alphabet. Music is a language replete with intent and with meaning and yet without words. These and other forms of artistic expression are the primary or original languages. They differ from our everyday working verbal tools — philosophy, science, theology, sociology and politics — in that they’re not dependent on a consensus of lexical or contextual meaning. The languages of creativeness certainly also mean (they may even make sense and sentences), but the meaning is carried by the totality of means at their disposaclass="underline" color, texture, echo, absence, shape, etc. They are both non-elusive and endlessly allusive. More than that, these languages are bound to forge new meanings, to transform perception in the real sense of the term. Ideally they don’t carry meaning but become as many meanings as there are minds. A poem is not just a statement or a lining or limping up of words; it is also the actualization of metamorphosis in process. You may say it is thought on its way to the unthinkable.
So, my first answer is: poetry is for writing straight, skinning the words so that they may shine as primary manifestations. Or, as second first answer: poetry is for writing over because we have been crooked out of a close communication / communion with the world in us and the world outside us, and we have to cheat our way back to paradise.
3. You say you are a beginner. How lucky you are! You don’t say, but I take this to imply that you have already indulged in verse, or else you wouldn’t be asking me these questions.
I’ll let you in on the secret everybody knows: Writing poetry is one of the most general forms of crying and communication that we humans attempt! We all write poetry at some point. Why? I think it is because we instinctively reach out for more powerful and perhaps more sincere ways of trying to access the essential (at that moment) or the unsayable, through words that are more than mere concepts; this is when we use a sharpened awareness of sound and rhythm and texture and spacing, of silences and omissions. . In other words, we attempt to capture what is beyond or around the words and their meanings by chiming with the ‘non-verbal’ components of communication.
In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels said: “I became obsessed by the palpable edge of sound. The moment when language at last surrenders to what it’s describing: the subtlest differentials of light or temperature or sorrow. I’m a Kabbalist only in that I believe in the power of incantation. A poem is as neural as love; the rut of rhythm that veers the mind. . This hunger for sound is almost as sharp as desire, as if one could honor every inch of flesh in words; and so, suspend time. A word is at home in desire. No station of the heart is more full of solitude than desire which keeps the world poised, poisoned with beauty, whose only permanence is loss.”
My attempted explanation, young lady, should be expanded: in the light of the above quote I further believe that we experience the need to merge or identify with primal movement in gestures and rituals shared by all of us since the very beginning of time. For, although creativeness breaks new ground, eroding or extending consciousness, it is also always recalling the underlying earth (ageless and timeless) of deep-sound, exorcism, incantation, the primeval gestures and movements outlining the ebb and flow of awareness. And although this may recall the original shared memory, essentially of our mortality, the manifestation will not only be ‘public’ but also, private and idiosyncratic.
Let me reiterate: Creativeness is both intensely individual (the lines of recognition and fashioning produced by one hand) and profoundly universal. ‘Universal’ by using a means of expression (in this instance writing) and, to an extent, a field of references shared generally. But universal, as well, because the major themes according to which we live our lives have been common to the species since the first dim glimmer of consciousness: death (or non-being), the urge to go beyond and thus the need to project (imagination, creating utopias), the desire to suspend decomposition by remembering (and remembering is a forgetting hand), the paranoia which comes with the fall between understanding and not understanding, building the face of presentable survival and then ‘facing’ the mirror of the other. It would appear that we need this recognition and affirmation of our shared rhythms of birth, growth, love and loneliness, maturing, fall, death and decay. Following the lines of the known will liberate the hand; sometimes, decay comes before death and the hand will be devoured by the maggots of words.
From this unfinishing business of passing from thought to dust will flow, I think, ethics and social responsibility (but also the urge to destroy), the sense of family, the pursuit of power. Power is the abuse of pain in the forlorn hope of extinguishing it. Even if we only do so vicariously by entering writing through reading. The first act of poetry is always a read: deciphering the stars, observing stick-like people shuffling over a horizon of shifting mirages in Africa, plunging into the dark heart of love. . And as we move, so we repeat. You will have noticed how one keeps on unearthing the bone of a favorite poem — surely because we want to recreate the instant, that identification with the original moment of feeling, and not because of the information encapsulated. The dog of time would have gnawed white the bare meaning of words. You will also know by now that the open process or proposition of a poem is only completed once it has been taken possession of and integrated by the reader. Each poem is unique and never finished. And there are as many poems as there are moments of reading, as many moments awakening the puckered mind of beginning. You are the dog, the poem the bone.
We are all beginners at the ‘useless’ pastime of planting the sun and later digging up the bone (which we will then venerate as an ancestral thigh), however long some of us may have been tilling the field pretending to put together the riddle of memory through the artifacts we found. Stanley Kunitz talks about the endlessness of beginning in a poem called “The Round,” and he’s now ninety-six years old and lately the poet laureate of his country. It just never stops. Also, it doesn’t get any better than this.