poetics
What is poetry? Why? How? Definitions, quotations, and theories; technical notes and queries (see also the “haiku” and “poetics bibliography” pages)…
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…I think poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It will help you to form the things, but what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you. It’s who you are.
…Poetry’s really about what can’t be said. And you address it when you can’t find words for something. And the idea is, is that the poet probably finds words for things. But if you ask the poet, the poet will tell you, you can’t find words for it. Nobody finds words for grief. Nobody finds words for love. Nobody finds words for lust. Nobody found — finds words for real anger. These are things that always escape words.
…I believe that poems begin with hearing and with listening. One listens until one hears something. Sometimes, and then if you say to people it begins with listening. They say, “What are you listening to? And what are you listening for?” And I say, “That’s what you have to find out.” You know? You have to learn how to listen first.
- W.S. Merwin, from the June 26, 2009 Bill Moyers Journal interview
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“But what, then, of writing?
…For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines, a world of textures, tastes, and sounds other than those that we have engineered, there can be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again, sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that place us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf” (273-274).
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
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Poet’s Welcome
The world renewed! I want to give water to every person journeying in search of a new world; I want to quench their weary bodies’ thirst. I have to thaw out their frozen bodies with a blazing fire on cold evenings.
More than that, I long to give them strong bars of iron to hold on to, to prevent them from being swept away by raging storms.
People made of mud cannot cross streams, people made of wood cannot go near a fire. And surely even someone made of hard iron will rust away into so much junk in less than a century.
Here stands a good-for-nothing who let himself get soaked till the mud dissolved, set fire to himself so the wood disappeared, and the iron finally rusted away in the wind and the rain.
Go now. A new life has been born, and isn’t that a new world?
from Ko Un’s What? 108 Zen Poems, 2008 (formerly titled Beyond Self, 1997).
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I think the best advice for someone reading poetry is this: just trust the poet and let yourself go. Reading poetry is like dreaming: you can’t control how the story is told; stop, then, trying to work things out and simply let yourself be surprised. Reading poetry can be like falling through the air, exhilarating, terrifying.
- Tim Lilburn, from an interview on the Victoria Public Library website.
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A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel – but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling – not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world – unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on Earth.
Or so I feel.
… ee cummings (and here is one more site)
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“The poet feels only fully awake when he is the vehicle for a poem. The rest of life may be pleasant, but it does not have that intense awareness which, having once experienced, he demands again and again. In poetry he feels that he sees through the veil of appearances into realities that extend beyond the confines of this life into territories of the spiritual and eternal. Even in his most mundane, most commonsensical poems, he feels a little of this. The reward of the poet is not financial, and is rarely public acclaim. It is the reward of feeling part of a spiritual universe vaster than that perceptible to the reason; it is the reward of feeling the soul growing in understanding and strength, though the mind may be puzzled and the body fail. If one can in any way help anyone to sense only a little of this in his own experience then one has done far more than help him to write poems. One has opened gateways to the mystery and majesty of eternal life” 147.
Robin Skelton, The Practice of Poetry. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1975. Read more…
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Jack Kerouac on both technique and spontaneity in writing…
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…As important as imagery is language. The danger of a poet using a language that exists only in books is very great. I’ve always tried to listen to how people actually talked. Especially I’ve listened to miners, seamen, people in close and clannish trades. I’ve noted how they speak in short, clipped sentences, designed to communicate information quickly in tense situations; how they manage to drop almost all articles and conjunctions. Turning that lesson inward upon my poems, I’ve never failed to be surprised at how many times words like ‘a’, ‘and’, and ‘the’ actually have no real function except to slow down the rhythm, make it stately, pretentious, ‘poetic’. Again, in listening to the conversation of almost everybody, I’ve noticed how often such a word as ‘have’ is shortened to something which sounds like ‘of’. Grammarians have noticed this too and, presuming that their poor dear children, their victims, are actually saying ‘of’, they condemn this as a grammatical error. Actually it is a contraction, and a good one. I represent it in a poem by an apostrophe ‘ev. Other words that are shortened are ‘will’, shortened to just ‘ll; ‘had’ and ‘would’, shortened to a single ‘d, and several others which I’ve probably forgotten.
I’ve always designed my poems to be spoken and heard, and therefore write English as I’ve observed it to be spoken. Only for the sake of special emphasis, again as the sound would occur in speech, will I write one of these words out.
The problem of grammar I’ve always looked on as a problem of clarity, nothing more. I pay no attention to formal rules of grammar when these rules have no relation to meaning. For example, I’ve completely and deliberately forgotten what the formal distinction is between the words ‘as’ and ‘like’. I treat these words as synonyms, and recommend that everyone else do the same. I’m a skeptic, and disbelieve that there was ever a real difference between ‘as’ and ‘like’ in the language as it was actually spoken (55-57).
Acorn, Milton. Hundred Proof Earth, ed. James Deahl. Toronto: Aya, 1988.
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1. Every poet is an experimentalist.
2. Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.
3. There is no one way to write and no right way to write.
4. The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
5. Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.
…from Marvin Bell’s “32 Statements About Writing Poetry” …Advice to Poets, Copper Canyon Press.
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The literature of a new era is not one that has simply descended from the past but is one that is currently newly born rooted in the soil of the past. Truth held by a friend is much closer to the real truth than the truth held by a teacher. A poem just born out of nowhere, not a poem suppressed with the yoke of tradition, whispers with another poem just born. This literature, a chorus creatively maintaining the horizontal relationship is what I dream of.
I hope my literature will wander around and not stay in one place. The Nirvana that I dream of is a Nirvana without any permanency. It is a dream with no leftovers.The present is a flash, a moment moving from the unlimited past to the indefinite future.
I sometimes see my former lives. In so many former lives of mine, I could not resist becoming a poet as in my present life. There were days that I was less tattered than I am today. There was someone weeping amidst the glow of the setting sun. Was it I? At midnight when snow falls silently unnoticed by anyone, he was enduring the reverberation of the heart not being able to fall asleep. Was it I?It is midday. There is a man who has fallen on the ground and he has told so many lies. Somewhere in the corner under the sun, there is a motherless boy growing taller day by day. There is a woman with no homeland, her hair blowing in the wind.
Korean poet Ko Un.
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Reading my notes of the trip – images, bits of conversations, ideas – I hunted a structure in the events, but randomness was the rule. Outside, sheltered by a live oak, a spider spun a web. Can an orb weaver perceive the design in its work, the pattern of concentric circles lying atop radiating lines? (115)
Least Heat-Moon, William. Blue Highways: A Journey Into America. London: Pan Books, 1984.
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…I always kept a hard-cover notebook (hardcover so it wouldn’t break up/crumple etc just in all the moving around) and I’d just free-associate every day or two…sketches of things…images…ideas for poems/stories…mostly describing the textures of the things around me…it was often that, in describing the most mundane thing, a morning in a market, the feel of a cafe I was having coffee in, the look of a gas station on the prairies in the middle of the afternoon…these things became the dominant imagery in a lot of my poems and stories…and just the knowledge that I was keeping this journal/diary/notebook eased the panic I’d feel if I thought I’d dried up…also, sometimes latching on to a really great poet and reading his/her poems and/or biographies etc etc…that would sometimes get me going too…don’t panic…I don’t think writer’s block is a myth…I think you just need to create a spot in the rhythm of your days where you can sit quietly and doodle along these lines…
John Lent, my former creative writing professor at Okanagan University College (excerpted from a personal correspondence).
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There is a singing in things. Or you can call it a sleep. Its beauty is a kind of loyalty, an upholding, a patriotism for something that does not seem to exist. Though immense, it is frail. This shining tone in things vanishes to be replaced by sentiment and ownership as soon as any sort of relationship with it is assumed. I want this thing and this wanting will make me poor (75).
Lilburn, Tim. Living in the World as if it Were Home: Essays. Dunvegan, Ontario: Cormorant Books, 1999.
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Permeability, porousness, works both ways. You are allowed to move through the woods with new eyes and ears when you let go of your little annoyances and anxieties. Maybe this is what the great Buddhist philosophy of interconnectedness means when it talks of “things moving in the midst of each other without bumping” (266).
Snyder, Gary. “The Porous World.” The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999.
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Poetry is a response, part automatic, part cerebral. Compact and light, it is a traveler’s art form, like mathematics. To make it, what do you need? Both memory and desire. You have to work hard, of course, and desire is not the same thing as wishing. But how hard is hard? (130)
Borson, Roo. “Poetry as Knowing”. Poetry and Knowing. Tim Lilburn, Ed. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1995.
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Some Points for a “New Nature Poetics”
- That it be literate – that is, nature literate. Know who’s who and what’s what in the ecosystem, even if this aspect is barely visible in the writing.
- That it be grounded in a place – thus, place literate: informed about local species on both ecological-biotic and sociopolitical levels. And informed about history (social history and environmental history), even if this is not obvious in the poem.
- That it use Coyote as a totem – the trickster, always open, shape shifting, providing the eye of other beings going in and out of death, laughing with the dark side.
- That it use Bear as a totem – omnivorous, fearless, without anxiety, steady, generous, contemplative, and relentlessly protective of the wild.
- That it find further totems – this is the world of nature, myth, archetype, and ecosystem that we must investigate. “Depth ecology.”
- That it fear not science. Go beyond nature literacy into the emergent new territories in science: landscape ecology, conservation biology, charming chaos, complicated systems theory.
- That it go further with science – into awareness of the problematic and contingent aspects of so-called objectivity.
- That it study mind and language – language as a wild system, mind as wild habitat, world as a “making” (poem), poem as a creature of the wild mind.
- That it be crafty and get the work done (262).
Snyder, Gary. “Unnatural Writing”. The Gary Snyder Reader. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999.
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I write poems like spiders spin webs, and perhaps for much the same reason: to support my existence. I talk, I eat, I write poems, I make love – I do all these things self-consciously. The ‘new area’ bit… well, unless one is a stone one doesn’t sit still. And perhaps new areas of landscape awaken old areas of one’s self. One has seen the familiar landscape (perhaps) so many times that one ceases to really see it. Maybe it’s like the expatriate writers, Joyce and so on, who went to foreign countries in order to see their own (892).
Purdy, Al. “An Interview”. 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics. Gary Geddes, Ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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How to be with the deer that see you at evening and who do not stir, the poplar, wolf willow clumps, the ghosts of this place? How to enter the wilderness of discrete things? I could write about it, have written poems about it, but this has cast me beyond writing. This place seems frail; the merest invention could make it disappear. How to know this land without vanquishing it? Poetry gestures to contemplation and contemplation feeds the poetry, modifying language by letting awe undermine it, pare it back, lending poems a humility, compunction. This is a land to wait in, watching. Bring anonymity; namelessness has a place here; the land worn to the bone hints into you an interior mimesis of namelessness. Bring sorrow. Watch (167).
Lilburn, Tim. “How to Be Here?” Poetry and Knowing. Tim Lilburn, Ed. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1995.
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Poetry must sing or speak from authentic experience. Of all the streams of civilized tradition with roots in the paleolithic, poetry is one of the few that can realistically claim an unchanged function and a relevance which will outlast most of the activities that surround us today. Poets, as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world, in its nakedness, which is fundamental for all of us – birth, love, death; the sheer fact of being alive (118).
Snyder, Gary. Earth House Hold. New York: New Directions, 1957.
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