Poetry is poetry. Or is it?

Greetings, fellow Deviants!

So this is a blog about poetry, and some of my thoughts on poetry, and some of my thoughts in general.

Recently, I have been trying to write a bit more poetry, and the more I read and write poetry, and the more I study poetry, the more I think about poetry. Logical as this seems, sometimes I wonder whether the genre of poetry truly lends itself to analysis; to a picking apart of a coherent and whole entity in order to “understand” it. I often ponder whether there are merits to this relentless literary unravelling of the enigmatic rainbow that is poetry.

I remember in high school, I was one of the few students who actually enjoyed poetry. It intrigued me, as it seemed to contain something sublime, something intangible yet profound. Most of my class hated it – it was like a cryptic code to be deciphered; a foreign language that they had no interest in learning. The way that poetry was taught at school reinforced these negative ideas, however – we had to figure out the “meaning” of the poem; find its hidden “message”.  In other words, we had to rationalise poetry, and try to make it fit the conventions of everyday language.

First year university English literature completely transformed my views on poetry. We were promptly told to forget everything we had learned about poetry in high school – my one lecturer even went so far as to proclaim that: “There is no f***ing message! Poetry is poetry.” Suddenly, poetry was so much more than a strange and confusing way of saying everyday things. Suddenly, poetry became a way of saying things that couldn’t be said in everyday language - a way of making up for the fallibility of structured prose.

I followed the historical journey of poetry, through fragments of lectures, enraptured – from the early oral poetry of the Homeric epics, to the grandeur and nature-worship of the Romantics, to the cynicism of the Modernists… It is truly amazing how one can mould language to create a whole new, oscillating way of expressing life. And poetry does express life – as it expresses death.

But I digress. One can become lost in poetry, much as one can become lost in prose. So, why do we write poetry? Does it matter? What is good poetry? All these questions we ask ourselves as writers, but there really aren’t any answers, only opinions; only subjectivities.

I have been influenced greatly by two dead thinkers – one a poet, one a philosopher. T.S. Eliot, possibly one of the greatest poets of all time [I admit I may be a bit biased, for what it’s worth], had very clear ideas as to what the role of the poet is. He believed that the mind of the poet is the catalyst; and that it is the poet’s job to collect fragments of the past, hold them in mind, and then when ready, combine them in a new and surprising way, to be presented as art. In order for this to be possible, the poet needs to sacrifice his or her personality and individuality, and function as a medium. Thus new art can never be “better” than anything that existed beforehand; it merely exists in different forms.

Eliot ends his essay by saying that,

“There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him 'personal'. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

This is, of course, a single opinion on poetics. More often than not, poetry is intensely personal; sometimes painfully so. But what does poetry do? I suppose it creates a unique discourse between writer and reader that transcends the limitations of the written word, and the rules of language. Poetry makes the reader feel something; it is this feeling that is conveyed primarily through imagery and form. Often I can feel this power at work, when reading a poem that affects me in a way that I just cannot put my finger on. A moment of unexplained connection.

The importance of connections is the field of my second dead thinker – the philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. According to him, humans are discontinuous beings (simply meaning that we are separated from each other by the gaps between our individual subjectivities – we can never truly know what it is like to “be” someone else). However, we long for continuity – which is ultimately embodied by death – a kind of dissolution, a becoming one with everything and thus ceasing to exist. We access a bit of death in life through eroticism – whether it be sex, love, or religious love – or poetry.

Is it that surprising to think of poetry as a way of accessing continuity? A way of connecting with the world, or with people? Bataille expresses this in the most profound way:

"Poetry leads us to the same place as all forms of eroticism - to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea."

In my opinion, this is one of the most important functions of poetry. Sometimes it feels like poems are written to be sent out into the ether, in the hope that someone will grab them; pick them out of the air like tiny feathers; and suddenly see their beauty. Or perhaps it is enough to leave them floating there, suspended.  

So that is pretty much a summary of my thoughts on the matter. Of course there are so many other theories about poetry, but these two have been living in my head for a while, and I felt that maybe they would like to meet some other people who might appreciate them.

Thank you for taking the time to read this; my primary hope is that it sparked some literary thought processes.

C