Thoughts on Poets and Poetry

Poetry and shock

                A poem is an immediate act of creation, a celebration of the moment’s pulse, its intent and unique nowness.  This is why Keats is reported to have said that he would happily write a poem in the evening, even if it meant “losing it on the morrow”. A poet never thinks beyond the moment-at least while they are writing- for in that moment lies an awareness that borders naturally on revelation. Things are seen in a wholly new light, fresh and pregnant with meanings that were unglimpsed before. Creation and the creative act of perceiving go hand in hand. The urge to write, to discover and celebrate comes out of this revelatory state of mind-the coals that are stirred to momentary brightness, to go with Shelley’s metaphor.

                Octavio Paz described the Zapotecan poet Lopez Velarde in the following way: He “had a sharp consciousness of our lack of being”, referring to those “electric” moments when through the power of metaphor and the “alchemy of the word”, the poet was able to render the shocking reality of everyday things. “El mundo no es nunca lo que plenamente es…excepto en algunos momentos privilegiados y que no es exagerado llamar electricos.” (The world is never what it really is...except in those gifted moments which it is no exaggeration to call electric).

The ear is the only true reader

                We know that something is right, instinctively, by the way it sounds. Frost called this the “sound of sense”, and it is with these speech sounds that both prose and poetry is concerned. In poetry the spoken voice is most naked. It is the spoken voice (always conscious of itself) made unconscious by emotion, carried along by its own lyric happening. This emotion is complex, amalgam of thought and feeling, a kind of impassioned thought.

                Ezra Pound was right in insisting on directness of treatment and clarity within a poem. A poem should always be direct and, for it to really attain wings, lyrical also. By lyrical I mean that every word should carry both rhythm and meaning: sense relies on rhythm as much as rhythm relies on sense. The two go together in poetry and it is useless to try and separate them.

Making strange

                When one language is pressed into another through translation, or the effort at translation to get meaning across, the result is often a vivid or poetic phrase. This happened often with the students I taught in Mexico. Take one student's attempt to describe the Renaissance:
“In the Renaissance the society had been reborn in mind”
That last phrase derives from the Spanish verb “renacer”: to be reborn, and its casual reworking into English here is striking.

                The confusion that arises when one language rubs up against another, often produces a kind of poetry- especially where the meaning becomes doubtful or various. The effect of this, where there is a genuine effort at expression, can be startling. This is apparent in one student's description of their home city:
                “That city is painfully of flowers!”
                Stretching the language in this way, moulding it and remaking it to express an emotional response, lets in an unexpected poetry. I say unexpected, because these children are simply trying to express themselves in the clearest way possible and are quite happy to manipulate language in a carefree way in order to do so. They manipulate language in the carefree way of a poet. This reminds me of a reflection made by Pessoa (in “The Book of disquietude”) about children’s forthrightness in saying what they feel, rather than expressing in general terms what they are supposed to feel, as in the case of a child on the point of tears who says: “I feel like tears”.

Clear confusion

                Every poem is a renewal of personal vision being acted out in the moment. In this sense a poem is “a momentary stay against confusion”, a brief affirmation of an individual’s ability to reach for and create both purpose and sense. Poetry or poem-making is therefore a joyful thing, even where it expresses the most painful thoughts and feelings, since its joy comes from the well-spring of consciousness given form- expression made possible in the moment. Yeats touches on this in his poem “Lapis Lazuli”, where he talks of Hamlet’s and Lear’s “gaiety”, of joy being inseparable from even the most tragic expression. He manages to marry heaven and hell in the following lines:

“All men have aimed at, found and lost;
   Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.”

                And so I come to be suspicious of language, not for what it says but what it fails to say- the casual thoughtlessness behind language as it’s used, the casual thoughtlessness before words that have been handed down. This taken-for-grantedness in our use of language which ignores that every word we speak has a reference to the “soul”, the expressive self. This sense is in the ore of a line from the Mexican poet Lopez Velarde:

“Anhelo de extirpar de mi cada palabra que no nazca de la combustion de mis huesos…”
“I wish to rid myself of every word that isn’t born from the combustion of my bones...”

                Poetry reveals itself through concentration, makes language strange in order to bring it closer to the senses, to the mind. Its strangeness is nothing more than the strangeness of lived experience.

Make it new

                An interesting take on poetry by Octavio Paz, proving that a good reader is -in one way at least- no less a poet than the actual poet:

“…to enjoy (a new work of poetry) the reader must learn its language and assimilate its syntax. This operation consists in casting off what’s known and learning what’s new; unlearning-learning implies an intimate renewal, a change of sensibility and vision.” (La Otra Voz 1990)

A poet is someone, who, out of an existing language creates a new one.

Michael Lee Rattigan was born in Croydon, England of Irish and Anglo-Indian parentage. His work has been published on the internet, in magazines (most recently in Blinking Cursor and OtherPoetry) as well as in book form: a chapbook of poems, "Nature Notes" and a bi-lingual translation of Fernando Pessoa's Caeiro poems. Both published by Rufus Books of Canada. 

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #009