A Little Concoction

Roof Garden sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, 2009 @sedsemperamor

I don’t know why I do this to myself…

As promised, here is my bold, ambitious and frankly foolish attempt to answer the question:

“Why poetry?”

Moreover, my inchoate attempts towards a theory of poetry are set against a backdrop of intellectual giants – Aristotle, Shelley, Dante, Eliot, Plato, Coleridge, Kant, Poe. Hmmm…I rely on your good nature, dear reader, to embrace my ideas as endearing ramblings as opposed to embarrassing rubbish. In addition, in my efforts to clarify for myself why poetry matters, I hope to stir within you questions, ideas and arguments that you would wish to share. This is my little concoction rather than my grand design; you are more than welcome to join me in blending the nebulous elixir.

Writing this post actually frightens me. So, why poetry? Firstly, because it is about life – birth, death, love, grief, ambition, joy, fear, jealousy – all of it, all of human existence. It is about everything.

“Poetry is a place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human condition.” Charles Simic

It is a place to explore the light and darkness in the world and within ourselves, to try to make sense of the contradictions, disappointments and impossibilities of life.

Like all forms of art, poetry unlocks doors to our understanding that intellect and reason alone cannot open. This is because a poem exists on many levels: content, meaning, context, rhyme, form, sound, culture, shape, language, tradition. A poem may (or may not) mean something but it always is. It validates and interrogates existence.

“Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.” Nathalie Sarraute

So simultaneously, a poem holds answers and questions. Opposing forces are bound together in space and time through a shared language. Poetry makes concrete the duality of our existence. Like us, it is everything and nothing.

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” Emily Dickinson

Poetry is the distillation of thought. It is language and consciousness pared to the bone. A poem cuts to the chase. Scratch the surface and another, distinctive surface is revealed. Words are blended, filtered, fermented, stretched to their limit, pulled apart and reconstructed. Dissonant fragments are carefully bound by artistic energy into a coherent whole greater than the sum of its parts.

“Every explicit duality is an implicit unity” Alan Watts

It attempts to express the inexpressible. It is an foolhardy, naive, unending struggle with the inexplicable, the impossible, the incomprehensible, the unspeakable. I love poetry for trying.

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation” Robert Frost

Poetry exposes our vulnerability. It is a tightrope of jeopardy and opportunity. Each word is a liability but it is through vulnerablity that we can achieve intimacy.

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” T.S Eliot

The reader must wrestle alone amongst the mysteries. Whilst connecting us to humanity, poetry is a personal and individual experience. It is a place of frenzied energy and vast stillness. The words of the poem are part of the world and yet are inside all of us.

“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.” Rick Riordan

The poet is a magician. Poetry shines a new light upon familiar things. It lends a bewitching sparkle to old and tarnished objects, experiences and ideas; it rejuvenates our mind, our eyes, our ears.

“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” Stephen Mallarme

Its form is a work of art. There is freedom in the constraint of rhythmic forms, unwieldy metres and uncomfortable rhyme.

“Every new poem is like finding a new bride. Words are so erotic, they never tire of their coupling.” Stanley Kunitz

New and unusual patterns are formed as words separate and converge in fresh combinations. The lifeless page is transformed into a dynamic incantation, where the medium is the message, the ephemeral is everlasting and the surface reveals the hidden depths.

“I turned silences and nights into words…I made the whirling world stand still.” Arthur Rimbaud

Portable and accessible,

“Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It exists simultaneously in silence and speech. It is practically useless and potentially transformative.

“they [words] hate being useful, that it is their nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possiblities” Virginia Woolf

To misquote Bill Shankly, some people believe that poetry is a matter of life and death. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that. Poetry matters. It is why I do this to myself.

Like us, it is pointless, confusing, deviant, contradictory, exacting. It is a willingness to inhabit the dust and ashes in an attempt to create something beautiful and eternal from the clay of human existence.  Poetry is

“A little concoction of words against death” Miroslav Holub

The Ordinary Instant

Underwater photograph by Nadia Moro http://www.nadiamoro.it/

“A person shows himself for an instant

as in a photograph but clearer

and in the background

something which is bigger than his shadow”

‘The Gallery’, Tomas Transtromer

How do we view the world and our place in it? Is it immutable or fluctuating? What changes an ordinary experience into an extraordinary one?

Suddenly, in the midst of everyday life, we can have a moment of clarity, an instant of distillation, through which the rest of our lives is viewed. There may be subtle movements or a major turning point in a split second.

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

Joan Didion

James Joyce wrote a series of short stories, ‘Dubliners’, based on such epiphanies – sudden moments of revelation – when the ground beneath our feet subtly shifts. Much art is created in an attempt to capture these ephemeral cracks in surface of reality, to draw out our thoughts and sensations, to arrest subtle, subterranean transformations.

In ‘Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes’, Lawrence Ferlinghetti makes explicit his desire to freeze such a moment in time. The poem opens,

“At the stoplight waiting for the light”

and describes the meeting of two dustbin men and “an elegant couple” at the traffic lights at 9 am in downtown San Francisco.

The two pairs are carefully juxtaposed. The grungy “garbage men in red plastic blazers” gaze down upon the cool couple “As from a great distance”. The beautiful people are expensively dressed in their elegant open Mercedes, as if in “some odorless TV ad”, whilst the scavengers hang off the truck, looking down like gargoyles. They are opposite extremes of society: rich and poor, powerful and underclass, bland and colourful, youthful and aged. But, for an instant, they cohere.

Two of the men are of similar age and appearance, “with sunglasses and long hair”, yet remain separated by  a “great gulf”.

“the light gleams for an instant, then it’s night once more”

Samuel Beckett

It is only the red light that can hold “all four close together” in this instant, before they drive off to their separate worlds, having learned nothing.

But we have. We, along with the scavengers and the beautiful people, are connected, eternally, in the words of the poem,

“As if anything at all were possible”

We are left suspended between optimism and pessimism, hope and resignation, futility and possibility. The final word of the poem may be ironic, but it is still “democracy”. We are held together by the red light,

“trapped in the amber of the moment”

Kurt Vonnegut

Every connection we make, however brief, is creative, transformative, invigorating,

“a lightning instant of give-and take”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

We glimpse an insight, however fleeting, into ourselves and others. We are offered a change of heart.

The frozen moment forces us to question our own position in this world. Can we be the beautiful people, in a reality “In which everything is possible”, or are we the scavengers, you and I, living on the margins, disenfranchised and gazing from a distance?

Do we not, in fact, flicker between the two, in an instant?

“Like a flash of lightnining between the clouds, we live in the flicker”

Joseph Conrad

We are both the beauty and the detritus of the world, selfless and selfish, creators and destroyers, victors and victims.

There is enduring and extraordinary beauty and revelation to be found within the ordinary, the aging, the decay, like the instant at the stoplight.

“Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.”

‘The Tempest,’ William Shakespeare

Gatsby believed in the green light.

I believe in the red light.