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Five things I like about poetry.
Apr. 21st, 2011 10:23 am1. Poems are like, no poems are galaxies. Scientists have found that if you add up all the visible matter in galaxies - dust, stars, planets, ice, gas, moons, comets, etc, it doesn't account for how fast they move. Indeed, the numbers only work out if you a) ignore many years of scientific precedent and flip Einstein and Newton the bird or b) postulate that galaxies not only contain but are made up mostly of dark matter.
The point is: What we can see and touch and analyze of galaxies does not add up to their actual impact upon the universe. They barrel on into the darkness in a way not expected if you only add up the tangible, visible bits. The lights and stars and shiny things are actually a proportional minority. Thus, we must come up with concepts to conceive the unconceivable just to name them properly because galaxies are actually more dark matter than light.
Had these scientists been poets, I think the fact that the vast majority of our universe is moved and shaped and filled with a force that is both utterly intangible and uninteractable and more profoundly real than a desk or a chair or a planet or a sun would have come as little or no surprise. Poets have known this forever. Indeed, it is our sole governing principle.
Which makes me undecided as to whether to pity or envy astrophysicist. After encounters with Pablo Neruda and ee cummings and Audre Lord, I have decided to pity the astrophysicist. Galaxies are wondrous, but useless ultimately, and ill-fated. They have to obey laws and do not control themselves. Poetry obeys nothing and no one and does whatever it damn well pleases, it is wild, it is made of exotic, constantly mutating particles, it defies space-time.
When we figure out dark matter, we will probably not be able to do very much with it.
If we ever figure out poetry's dark matter, we will have become God.
2. Poetry is traditionally a better ally to the oppressed than any well meaning privileged person could hope to be. It isn't just that poetry is neutral, it's not. Oh, it takes a side. Neutrality tends to favor the oppressor, because oppressors require nothing less than total resistance to be stopped. Poetry does just this the way the surface of a body of water can break bones like concrete upon impact even though, at a gentle trickle, it's the most harmless stuff you can think of. The harder you try to hit it, the more you get hurt. Poetry rewards softhandedness.
This allows it to become whatever is needed, keened to the will of those who are in the most pain. It is humble, it is majestic, it is private, it is public. It shapes itself to the wounds in the world, a perfect fitting bandage that lets blood through if blood letting is needed. It can be the ultimate soldier, hiding in plain sight, camouflaged in a way that cannot be weaponized by enemies, speaking in codes that are only decipherable to those meant to hear it. It can be refuge, it can be preservation, it can even be revival of the dead.
And even if the words are appropriated and invading forces lay hands on the text and the speakers and the tongues, the soul of the thing, the dark matter slips right on through, immune to appropriation. Better yet, this dark matter does not idle. It weasels its way in, it infiltrates the infiltrator. It turns the master's tools into to playthings for children of all ages. It turns bullets into building blocks.
3. Speaking of, medicine and poetry are very much alike. Poetry can be morphine, naproxen, steroids, weed, LSD. It can be an external hallucination, it can make you strong, it can soothe pain and let a strained muscle function more completely through practice and therapeutic stretching, it can put you in an ecstatic, euphoric state, it can give you back your appetite. It can even heal - it works wonders for heart failure.
To bolster this metaphor, I offer proof. Consider this. Governments have long suppressed both drugs(medicine) and poetry to control their populations and poetry was the original offender. The world over, power disdains poetry, fears it, tries to create hermetical sealed environments where only "good" poetry gets in, where people have to go to approved sources to get just the minimal effective doses of approved poetry, the kind that isn't harmful when taken under proper supervision as prescribed. Manufacturers and distributors of illegal poetry face punishment. See how they use these tactics now? How did you think such a skill was honed and on what stone?
So I will not be surprised when I hear my government declare a war on poetry. I will not be surprised when the day comes that I am given Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Blake-treatments to cure me of my terrible addictions to the worst poetry, the stuff that gets smuggled into our borders from un-civilization, the stuff manufactured in some basement or back alley by untrained amateurs. I will not be surprised when the government fears the rising epidemic of young people passing these horrible street poems around, warping their minds with it, getting violent and loud and out of line with it, and how it's unwinding society like a ball of yarn until there just won't be anything but messy bits of string all around.
Oh, wait. Some of that is already happening.
4. There is a long kept secret about poetry, one that many poets dare not utter. It is this: Anyone can do poetry and sometimes the best poetry is done by non-poets, un-poets, sub-poets, and de-poets. You do not even need paper or literacy, either. If you can hum a tune with words, you've done poetry. (Oh, yes, what are songs but poems that brought along a friend or two to help them get dressed up for a marvelous feast.)
If you can say something in a way that is just a little twisted or dented or turned sideways, you've done poetry. If you can be so angry or so hurt or so excited or just so that you stand before people and let the words flow out, coughing and convulsive and shaking the way it does when you revive a half-drowned person, you've done poetry.
No length required, no meter necessary, no form mandatory. Four words or four thousand or four million or four billion or for ever. You've done poetry.
If you can sit quietly (or not) and think (or not) until a something comes into your head that doesn't belong there and that bothers you so much that it has to come out, plucked like shrapnel or maybe just a splinter, or else take the rest of your brain out of proper alignment, you have done poetry.
Recording in any medium is entirely optional.
5. This is not a poem. Unless you want it to be. Poetry is half shared agreement, half neuro-linguistic ambush, half dialectical imposition, half moon howling, half mutual, desired misunderstanding. For those playing the home game, yes, I am indeed as bad with numbers as I am with verse. But that doesn't make it any less true.
The point is: What we can see and touch and analyze of galaxies does not add up to their actual impact upon the universe. They barrel on into the darkness in a way not expected if you only add up the tangible, visible bits. The lights and stars and shiny things are actually a proportional minority. Thus, we must come up with concepts to conceive the unconceivable just to name them properly because galaxies are actually more dark matter than light.
Had these scientists been poets, I think the fact that the vast majority of our universe is moved and shaped and filled with a force that is both utterly intangible and uninteractable and more profoundly real than a desk or a chair or a planet or a sun would have come as little or no surprise. Poets have known this forever. Indeed, it is our sole governing principle.
Which makes me undecided as to whether to pity or envy astrophysicist. After encounters with Pablo Neruda and ee cummings and Audre Lord, I have decided to pity the astrophysicist. Galaxies are wondrous, but useless ultimately, and ill-fated. They have to obey laws and do not control themselves. Poetry obeys nothing and no one and does whatever it damn well pleases, it is wild, it is made of exotic, constantly mutating particles, it defies space-time.
When we figure out dark matter, we will probably not be able to do very much with it.
If we ever figure out poetry's dark matter, we will have become God.
2. Poetry is traditionally a better ally to the oppressed than any well meaning privileged person could hope to be. It isn't just that poetry is neutral, it's not. Oh, it takes a side. Neutrality tends to favor the oppressor, because oppressors require nothing less than total resistance to be stopped. Poetry does just this the way the surface of a body of water can break bones like concrete upon impact even though, at a gentle trickle, it's the most harmless stuff you can think of. The harder you try to hit it, the more you get hurt. Poetry rewards softhandedness.
This allows it to become whatever is needed, keened to the will of those who are in the most pain. It is humble, it is majestic, it is private, it is public. It shapes itself to the wounds in the world, a perfect fitting bandage that lets blood through if blood letting is needed. It can be the ultimate soldier, hiding in plain sight, camouflaged in a way that cannot be weaponized by enemies, speaking in codes that are only decipherable to those meant to hear it. It can be refuge, it can be preservation, it can even be revival of the dead.
And even if the words are appropriated and invading forces lay hands on the text and the speakers and the tongues, the soul of the thing, the dark matter slips right on through, immune to appropriation. Better yet, this dark matter does not idle. It weasels its way in, it infiltrates the infiltrator. It turns the master's tools into to playthings for children of all ages. It turns bullets into building blocks.
3. Speaking of, medicine and poetry are very much alike. Poetry can be morphine, naproxen, steroids, weed, LSD. It can be an external hallucination, it can make you strong, it can soothe pain and let a strained muscle function more completely through practice and therapeutic stretching, it can put you in an ecstatic, euphoric state, it can give you back your appetite. It can even heal - it works wonders for heart failure.
To bolster this metaphor, I offer proof. Consider this. Governments have long suppressed both drugs(medicine) and poetry to control their populations and poetry was the original offender. The world over, power disdains poetry, fears it, tries to create hermetical sealed environments where only "good" poetry gets in, where people have to go to approved sources to get just the minimal effective doses of approved poetry, the kind that isn't harmful when taken under proper supervision as prescribed. Manufacturers and distributors of illegal poetry face punishment. See how they use these tactics now? How did you think such a skill was honed and on what stone?
So I will not be surprised when I hear my government declare a war on poetry. I will not be surprised when the day comes that I am given Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Blake-treatments to cure me of my terrible addictions to the worst poetry, the stuff that gets smuggled into our borders from un-civilization, the stuff manufactured in some basement or back alley by untrained amateurs. I will not be surprised when the government fears the rising epidemic of young people passing these horrible street poems around, warping their minds with it, getting violent and loud and out of line with it, and how it's unwinding society like a ball of yarn until there just won't be anything but messy bits of string all around.
Oh, wait. Some of that is already happening.
4. There is a long kept secret about poetry, one that many poets dare not utter. It is this: Anyone can do poetry and sometimes the best poetry is done by non-poets, un-poets, sub-poets, and de-poets. You do not even need paper or literacy, either. If you can hum a tune with words, you've done poetry. (Oh, yes, what are songs but poems that brought along a friend or two to help them get dressed up for a marvelous feast.)
If you can say something in a way that is just a little twisted or dented or turned sideways, you've done poetry. If you can be so angry or so hurt or so excited or just so that you stand before people and let the words flow out, coughing and convulsive and shaking the way it does when you revive a half-drowned person, you've done poetry.
No length required, no meter necessary, no form mandatory. Four words or four thousand or four million or four billion or for ever. You've done poetry.
If you can sit quietly (or not) and think (or not) until a something comes into your head that doesn't belong there and that bothers you so much that it has to come out, plucked like shrapnel or maybe just a splinter, or else take the rest of your brain out of proper alignment, you have done poetry.
Recording in any medium is entirely optional.
5. This is not a poem. Unless you want it to be. Poetry is half shared agreement, half neuro-linguistic ambush, half dialectical imposition, half moon howling, half mutual, desired misunderstanding. For those playing the home game, yes, I am indeed as bad with numbers as I am with verse. But that doesn't make it any less true.
