Of course, to be a beginner is neither simple nor easy. I’m saying it is important to approach the act (or the suspension) of writing poetry as if for the first time, with awe and wonder, experiencing the words as familiar foreigners in the house: it is about time to get to know them better before they rob or rape you. (Or if you permit them to do so, at least have some pleasure in return.) Partly because no poem is ever a final cure or even curse — it is but ‘marking’ time.
Neste papel
pode teu sal
virar cinza;
(“On this paper / your salt could / turn to ashes;”)
João Cabral de Melo Neto in Psychology of Composition
Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one’s own. .) If you ask what poetry is ‘about,’ it means that you have already started learning alliteration and assonance and allegory (being ‘other-speak,’ as it means in Greek). You will perhaps have become familiar with the female or feline or ferocious forms of ballads and ballades and blank verse and the blues, of cantos and chants and concrete poems, of eclogues and elegies and epics and epigrams. In due course, as you go along, you will find your feet: the iambs and the trochees and the dactyls and the anapests and the spondees. You will move through found poems, free verse, odes and rengas and villanelles and pantoums and rap, ghazals and haikus and limericks and lyrics and madrigals — by means of metaphor (the ‘vehicle of transport’) and image and line and strophe and quatrain and stanza and rhythm and rhyme (ah, of many positions and several genders, even terza rima if that’s your perversion). You may end up as a dark well reflecting the stars in sonnets and sestinas. . Don’t be trampled by horses at the watering trough! Death starts at the feet.
Please don’t take my fumbled mumbling for gospel and don’t be put off by my oblique approach: as a beginner I too am only now starting to understand why I set out on this journey.
4. What is poetry, you ask? Put differently — what are its ambitions? No, we may not know once and for all what it is, but we can trace some of its characteristics in the movements. For it is of the essence of poetry to do, not just to be. True enough, it may well be in the nature of any language to be, fixing our approximations of meaning and serving as communication, but there too it must perpetually become in order to raise our desires — to allude, slide away, open spaces by looking for ambivalence and cracks, and thereby engender the images which will arise from these.
The psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott remarked somewhere: “Artists are continually torn between the urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found.”
I’d suggest that poetry is a world (the world inside and outside us) shaped by breath. It is the breath of dreaming drawn from a hunger for awareness — the awareness that tells you that to be awake is also the result of dreaming expressed in the internal vibration of rhythm.
Poetry is a love. Of what? Of the discovery and the celebration of words, things, feelings, ideas, undigested memories, insights, other people, yourself, other selves, mystery, sense, eternity, other eternities, nonsense, nothingness, the whales and the foam and the shadow of grass on the mountain, the bones of the dog buried in the garden. Of love itself. And it is an engagement with all of the above. It is a love-act.
Poetry is a love of that art of making which will take you away from self-indulgence — for even as you fashion it, it takes on a life of its own. And although it is the freest of entanglements, capable of containing whatever you wish to put in it (provided you can make it fit), it does have form and tradition. Indeed, when the poem starts working its form will emerge to take possession of the shape. (“The very age and shape of time is form.”) This you have to recognize. You should curtsy or touch the brim of your hat. The paradox is that you imagine you are emptying the self on the page, and what you get is a mirror in which the triteness or relative (un)importance of your emotions is weighed. One finds that an endless fascination with self and the caressing of one’s own loneliness will not take you very far down the road of becoming other. Staking out the self is a lonely business; you end up finding your shadow a noisy stalker scaring the self into a fearful blathering. Nothing is as banal and common and goat-like as the self. It is true though, that this mirror of inconsequentiality can also, through recognition, constitute identification with larger attitudes and convictions and expectations; it will reflect the shadows and smoke of history’s movements even as these darken your eyes.
Yeats said love comes from the energy to create and the energy to create comes from love.
Forgive me if I repeat myself. I have already said that poetry is the process of transfiguring words back into the original breath, the beat of the world. It goes without saying that words will always retain their intrinsic or agreed-upon characteristics — those that they evoke in sound and texture (the ‘heart’ is after all not an organ, but in its own way, as word, it beats with resonance, origin, sound and taste) — and then, when alert to the power of context, placed in a field of tension, modified by proximity and juxtaposition and in pattern with other words, tested by distancing. . they become the moments in a metamorphosis provoked by image and metaphor, “lucid objects of language”, to open on to a “third dimension” beyond the references of word-meaning.
I’m suggesting that poetry can be a discipline of consciousness. It may furthermore embody an ethic of being. It can. It ought to. It can be a life-long mirroring meditation on life. It can be a companion light as you go toward and into the darker spaces of death to join the nocturnal tribes.
Perhaps I was just giving way to anger and frustration when I tried to pit the languages of creativeness against those of academia. It is more likely a case of ‘horses for courses.’ Nevertheless, my ranting might inadvertently have highlighted the specificity and autonomy of the discourses of creativeness. In a well-known essay called “The Redress of Poetry,” Seamus Heaney wrote: “Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W. B. Yeats’s terms, the will must not usurp the work of the imagination. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a. . context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. (—) Poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense — as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices — is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry, as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means. (—) Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness.”
5. And what is poetry not? This too I have already said: it is not a way to power or riches or status or position. Not even at university. It is not an answer to loss and it cannot assuage the sorrows of the world. It will not bring down governments. It is not a blotting paper to life, sopping up the bloody ink to give back a fuzzy ‘truth’ all the more meaningful because now indistinct mirror writing. (Although, you should please keep in mind and in mouth the fact that what emanates as poetry is always inserted in the public domain. We have to live this duality. Italo Calvino wrote in a text called “Questionnaire, 1956”: “And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. . Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative.”)