I Think That I Shall Never See
On the day I ponder poetry
I signed up for a four-session poetry class through the OSHER Life Long Learning program at Missou. It starts this afternoon. So I’m trying to explain to myself why. I had intended to not post this, certain that it should end up pressed between digital pages in the dark. But I often don’t listen to my own best advice.
For those among you who are seasoned poets or poetically inclined, please share your thoughts. I’m just riffing here from the outside looking in. Why do you find the effort of poetic expression worth the hard work it takes?
Everyday words grow weak in the quantum age. They are inadequate to fill the gaps in our map of what is and why, much less what might yet become of language in the era of LLMs.
Maybe through poetry one gains peripheral vision, to illuminate tiny extra bits of light at the edges of what can be seen at central focus.
The word clusters that we call physical laws, the equations physicists use, and the numerics of mathematicians will not someday explain the world fully, enough to say we comprehend it. Will the Universal Equation contain a lot of poetry, you think?
Some day, Science will stand, hat in hand, not able to pass beyond the threshold of words and meaning of the subjective. This is the hard problem of consciousness they say. Bring in the poets in hard hats?
Science can describe only that which can be measured. Poetry attempts to know what can be felt. Both are essential. And yet subjectivity has gotten a bum wrap as an irrelevant outsider that I never thought it deserved.
I am willing to begin to learn an alien-other language if only to break the self-imposed embargo on neglected grief and bewilderment of the past five years, life diminishing day by day in the dilution of a life companion.
Reality is personal and ultimately we each live within our own "perception box" that is the water we swim in. We think of our personal reality as the whole of it and it is such a tiny quirky-personal bit of The All.
What if poetry is a holodeck for making worlds that do not (yet) exist?
I confess that I have yet to learn what poetry IS:
I have not made much of an effort to explore the generative poiesis of poetry. I have mostly encountered it through of words of others that in the reading or hearing often leave me unreached. [The notion that there are "good" poems grokked on first hearing and those also "good" that must be read through time and again to in order to"see".]
Perhaps poetry comes from trusting one's own instincts and being willing to [cliche alert] throw the spaghetti of language on the wall so that something sticks and like tea leaves, the chaos transmogrifies into cosmos there in the bottom of the cup.
Poetry as the alchemy of language?
Maybe poetry is the romancing of ordinary words--in matters of meter and sound and shape and mouth-feel in such a way that they carry more than or different from ordinary meaning.
Does poetry, when it works, make the profound FOUND; the inscrutable SCRUTABLE; make EFFABLE the ineffable; and metamorphose meaning from the metaphysical?
Perhaps there are those that think this is the purpose of poetry, who also claim that some human types are capable of this by intention and do this kind of magic at will while sweating blood. It has to be hard work.
I guess it makes sense that high output (fewer words / more meaning) takes more energy of intention, and that poetry’s aim is to say more with less.
Here's a reach: What if, like some, I think Consciousness and Life are fundamental and not emergent-derived properties, maybe then too, Poetry was there in the Beginning and not merely so much word salad that bubbled up after tongues were invented.
There is a galaxy of poetry within all that, certainly. In the beginning was--the Word.
Will AI write the perfect poem? And then what?
I don’t know what to expect going in or coming out of this short burst of poetic focus. The poets included in the sessions, I am told, will be Ross Gay, Ada Limon, Joy Harjo and Mary Oliver. I know Mary Oliver but not the rest.
If you have favorite poets or poems to recommend, please share; and if you care to, say why a certain poet “reaches” you.
I am new to appreciating poetry. I used to "not understand" it. But I belong to a friend group that is well-read and fhese women make regular references to various poems so a few years ago I was inspired to "try harder". I found some helps: Read a poem aloud. TWICE. Slowly and with pause. (And even better, after reading it aloud have it read aloud to me by someone else.) Activate my mind's eye and life experience. These simple practices have helped me immensley to gain confidence and deeper appreciation for poetry. NOW, I am eager to engage with a poem. I find poetry FEEDS my SOUL much like scripture feeds it.
Here is one of my very favorite poems which I found at the very beginning of my efforts to "try harder" to "understand" poetry.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry
Wendell Berry. Gary Snyder, William Stafford and W.S. Merwin. Their sense of wonder and love of the living earth uplifts and comforts me. Sometimes, when I am out in the woods, a line or two from one of their poems pops into my mind in the most wonderful way.