Like a flock of birds, a poem is often anti-narrative, obscuring its sense of beginning, middle or end, reflecting its own internal momentum and evolving emergent contours and forms. A poem seeks simultaneous order and disorder in its structures and aesthetic mix, filtering through its diction and syntax both the simple and complex, seeing both what belongs as well as that which appears not to belong.
Archives for April 2013
The Snare of Poetry (A Trap for Catching Birds or Animals)
Poetry can be thought of as a snare for thinking. Offering neither clear answers nor resolutions, its puzzle/riddle-like quality has the form or force of a question where the answer is contained within the question. It doesn’t provide directions, but rather presents predicaments the reader must alone encounter and interpret.
What a poem does is find itself from the inside out; its centres of thought draw together its periphery, giving birth to the force of reciprocal influences. The complex of words and syntax of a poem rearranges fixed ways of understanding what is happening by actively undermining and then re-building relationship and presence, time and perspective. You can’t understand or think about just one thing for long; your mind must wander endlessly in search of a way out.
Something Out of Nothing
One of the great joys of poetry is that much of the time it is made up of nothing at all. Like physics or good conversation, that which is most elegant, intelligent and entertaining in a poem depends as much on what is missing as what is actually there. The ambiguity of empty space defines what must occupy that space, while the silences embracing our words create questions and teach us the luxury and balance of knowing little while assuming much more.
Inside a poem, the illusion of space is created in the arrangement of the words. That syntactical arrangement is as important as the words, always bringing us either closer or further away from the satisfaction or disappointment of understanding.
Poetry emerges as a kind of practical optical illusion. Its words are laced with unintended interpretations, and, as a result, produce unintended consequences and directions for the poem as a whole.
At its heart, any poem is a reflection of the inherent structures and disruptive patterns of language, as well as the emergent nature and exploratory processes of thought itself.
The persuasive structural process of thinking in poetry involves variously, and in no particular order: proposal, description, contention, illumination, projection – with “projection” being defined not in terms of a simple conclusion, solution or resolution, but rather a complex emergence into a philosophic place beyond the poem’s limits, a departure as well as suspension invoking meditation, intuition, or belief. All parts of this process function as intricate, intimate and multifaceted sequences of sometimes unintended but integrated linkages.
Thinking like this, poetry is a conversation or explanation that gives a lot for a little, sometimes from nothing at all.