I often hear people express they have trouble understanding poetry. That it’s too abstract, that they have trouble finding “the meaning”. The trouble lies in the belief that poems serve meaning on a silver platter.
I enter poems like rooms. When you think about how much our environments influence us and inspire certain feelings, a poem acts in the same way. Walking into the room of a poem, you experience a world of sensation. There are smells, tastes, feelings, sounds, colors, that may be familiar to you but are combined to create a unique experience.
You’re in somebody else’s room now. The author has a lifetime of different associations with the color red, or a full moon, or the ocean, or the smell of coffee…although you may not leave your own myth at the door, to open yourself to a poem is to enter the room in an author’s heart. Do not try to seek meaning, just sit in the room and allow yourself to look around and feel what it’s like to be in there. Sometimes the author has the meaning hanging up on the walls, or you may find that the meaning is not the words themselves but the universe behind the words — the feeling of the room itself.
It can be hard to pin down what constitutes a poem. For a long time, people believed it was rhyme, meter, stanzas, etc. but poetry, along with many other forms of expression, has learned to break free.
Is it defined by intention? “I’m going to write a poem!” or “These feelings are big and abstract, I’m just going to brain vomit”. Some write with a distinct meaning in mind, others write for the journey. Usually when I write a poem I never have a meaning in mind. I’m blindly dancing around the heart of Something, spiraling in, using the subtle beatings of its pulse as a guide.
Koans are an ancient form of poetry used by Zen Buddhists that challenge the rational mind, the part of us that wants to find meaning. They are like riddles that cannot be solved through conventional modes of thought, like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “What was your original face before your parents were born?”. They’re meant to be meditated on; when you stop trying to understand it, it is understood. The lines in Corso’s poem above read like koans. The practice of koans is a relevant approach to any poem — it reminds us to leave our pragmatism at the door and awaken a deeper understanding through our intuition and experience.
So poetry is something we create, something we read, it’s also something we find. We stumble upon it, like in the things we say that accidentally have a bigger world behind them. Recently, me and a friend were walking underneath an overpass, loud with the echo of cars, when I said it ‘sounded like planes were taking off all around me’. They stopped and told me that was a powerful line, and I’ve been chewing on that line ever since.
I don’t believe poetry is limited to words. Photographers are capturers of visual poetry; of the scenes that poetry is written about. But had poetry always lived in these moments or was it created in the eye of the photographer? Or the eye of the one viewing the photograph?
I suppose if we give anything enough of our attention, we can find the poem in it.
Photographer Robert Adams speaks on the poetry living quietly in the above photograph. Without his guidance, I don’t believe I’d find it on my own:
Robert Benjamin places us where we can rest a hand on the irregularly bent wall of the stock tank. In the distance, the rain is coming our way and the light is about to change. There is, just now, no place on earth exactly like this one…And the scene holds us because it implies something beyond itself. The surface of the water is a mirror not only of the sky but also of an unaccountable peace and benevolence.
Poetry feels so human in that it’s the language of communion. Communion with love, nature, death, grief, getting drunk, dogs, mystery, anything anybody decides to write a poem about. When we commune with something we are truly seeing It, connecting with It. Ancient poetry often spoke to the gods; gods of which were born to explain the miracle of beauty. And as Robert Adams says, “For many artists, beauty is the voice out of the whirlwind”. So may we always keep our ears to the wind and listen for the song of beauty.
I think a poet lives in everyone. Each of us is creating our myth, consciously and unconsciously. Myths are the unique associations with words that we create through our connections with the world; the elements of our story. It’s our own personal meaning in a world of billions of stories recycling the same words over and over. With poetry, we give old words new life. We don’t speak them for others, we speak them for ourselves. We fill them with our own life-force, bending and stretching their meaning. Poetry takes the language we share and makes it our own.
Poets open secret doors with their all-seeing eye, revealing the complexity of life’s inner workings. They are the one’s who are paying attention to the voice out of the whirlwind. One can be a poet without ever writing. It’s having an acute awareness; a way of Seeing. But we need the writers because so many of us are feeling things we can’t explain. It’s a way of sharing humanity and feeling less alone in the mystery of it all.
In that vein, Emily Dickinson explains what’s in the heart of a poem, in far less words.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
Thank you. I am one who never got poetry. I will embrace them in a new understanding. Thank you all my love Dear Niece.
This is beautiful