Poetry on Poetry
“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved
in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were
locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the
answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even
noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
My friend who took up her Masters in
Philosophy said she did so so she could get some freaking answers. She ended up
with more fucking questions. I took up Literary and Cultural Studies so I can
learn how to read, but language (with all its shapes and silences), more
than ever, eludes me. It’s a love-hate relationship. (With more love
than hate, I hope.)
What I know about poetry: that we
should aspire for an impure one, riddled with our sweat and tears and snot,
soiled by the dirt of too much living, tasteless perhaps, but altogether real.
Crude perhaps, but altogether honest. And because of that, terrifyingly
beautiful. (or is it beautifully terrifying?) Ah, it’s all in the irony. “because beauty is the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it for the serene scorn it can kill us with," Rilke said.
Some quotes about poetry swimming in my head:
“Poetry is not a luxury. It’s a matter of survival.” (Audre
Lorde)
“Poetry is the moment you lay your eyes
on what you can’t have”
“Poetry is a zoo where we keep our angels and demons.”
Poetry is not the
light you switch on/ To find a room
It is the incandescence dark bodies give off
It is the wife seen in an eye of hazard. /It is the silence
that remains when/ your life
in translation is pulled howling away
by the
hair,/by the hour, by them.
(Emanuel Torres)
Still.
all I know is, I know enough about poetry to say I know jack shit about it. And
with that, I’ll leave its defining (or the eluding of defining) to the people
who know how to elude defining best –the poets.
“Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”
(below is a poem of John Ashberry that I love.)
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PARADOXES AND OXYMORONS
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the stream and chatter of typewriters.
It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.
***************************************************************************************************
Words seem lifeless next to your
yellow blaze
next to your red tail,
next to your bright amaranth mane.
words are simply cold.
we say “fire” –-
fire! fire! fire!–
But you’re not
just a word,
though words
entirely lacking
in flame
shake loose and fall
From the tree of time.
You are
flower,
fancy,
consummation, embrace,
and elusive substance.
You are violence and destruction,
secrecy, stormy
wing of death and life,
creation and ashes alike.
you are a dazzling spark,
a sword covered with eyes,
you are eminence,
autumn or sudden summer,
gunpowder’s dry thunder,
collapse of mountain ranges,
river of smoke,
obscurity and silence.
………
go ahead,
burn me
now
flare
into my song,
course
through my veins
exit
through my mouth.
………..
Show me
your green and orange body,
raise
your flags,
crackle
on the surface of the earth
or right here by my side, as calm
as pale topaz.
Look at me, then go to sleep.
Climb the stairs
on your multitude of feet.
Chase me,
come alive
so I can write you down,
so you can sing
with my words
in your own way,
burning.
Excerpts, Neruda’s Ode to Fire.
