MacLeish sums it up nicely in his poem “Ars Poetica”
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.…
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.…
A poem should not mean
But be.
Categories
Category: Ars Poetica
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Proof of God?
Sometimes you just have to write and the poem becomes…calling for itself from the void dark matter.
I did not set out to write this poem. (Agape 1) It fell into place around my contemplation of the love poem. There are a couple ideas at play. Caregiver. These are garden psalms being literally written in my garden, so the overseer is primary thematically. “The sum is greater than its separate parts.”
I like Gertrude Stein’s use and intent of “human being”(i) to say it as an active sentence in present tense. It has an essence of mindfulness, being, present in the moment; caught in the act of being human. The poet is placed as a juxtaposition, a dichotomy to the soldier, who stands out against the other archetypes being a destroyer while at the same time being the protector.
The poet as a meaningful archetype is also anchored here as the beginning of an argument for Plato “A Defense for Ars Poetica”.
Questions – why should I inject the poet here? Is there any real sacrifice that the poet makes to care for culture? Does the dead art of poetry deserve a place at the table with these other archetypes?
Wouldn’t the poem be better without the last line?
My father used to preach a sermon every year about Love. From an early age, I understood that love (like myriad words for ICE in Inuit) has many words and many subtle meanings. The sermon covered and explored the Greek words, plural, for love. Eros – Erotic, sexual love. Philos – Friendship, brotherly love. Agape – Self-sacrificial love. His conclusion was that Christ became the ultimate expression of Human Love by sacrificing his Human Being. The love of a parent to a child, believer and God.
I have added Psychí. Psyche, wife to Eros and goddess of the Soul. My granny used to say that her and my papaw believed they had a psychic connection and that they would try to see if they could connect their thoughts while he was away at work. Building on this idea, I am exploring a transcendental love of the married. Beyond finishing each other’s sentences, life-long couples can explore and develop a quantum entanglement that is connected beyond the other forms of love. This life energy that the two share leads to wordless exchanges and un-spoken understandings.
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Making of Americans
…I write for myself and strangers.
Mostly everyone dislikes to hear it. I love it and I write it. Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that every one is of a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying of them, always I am seeing their repeating. More and more I love it of them, the being in them, the mixing in them, the repeating in them, the deciding the kind of them every one is who has human being.
From the Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
It is my underlying interest in musical meter and repetition and the idea that repetition brings with it a primal sense of comfort in our brains that has taken hold in my current writing. It is the spiral that binds us to the galaxy destined to return over and over again but never to the same place you started repeating your ritual your habit day after day sunset after sunrise your repetition creating your human being.
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Twice
You can write the same poem more than once.
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It speaks to you
I went to buy a book of poems
Hearts, identities, wants, failures
Scattered across pages, books, shelves of books, shelves of
poetic thrashings
Awaking from the same bad dream, writing the same bad poetry
that releases your free will to subjugation and lies
dormant in the pithy pulp, poet after poet
screaming unto no one, until
“I’ll take this one”
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Hubris
I don’t care what you think the meaning of your own work may be. The listener will be moved by their own experience or you aren’t doing a very good job as a poet. This is not to say that you should not know what your own work means (to you). Don’t expect the same from the user.
If a poem sits on the shelf and no one reads it, is it poetry?