Poetry: A Meditation on Meaning
What is poetry? Besides being a question that begs immediate dismissal, it is, looking away from the interrogative and toward the personal, above all, a process of sorts, one that calls upon the intimacy of language to bare itself to an audience of like-minded procedural exhibitionists casting a kind of sideways glance into oblivion’s dismissive creed. And how does one get involved in such questionable intimacy? Paradoxically, for me at least, this intimacy is gained as should be all relations trafficking in shared weaknesses — by remaining painfully silent, cloaked in a heavily conscientious avoidance of uttering the naked phrase: “I’m a poet.”
But does having lurk in one’s mind the soft unspoken flesh of being as poet sustain an intimate knowledge of what poetry is? Partly, I would say yes, for it is obvious that poetry is that which cannot be spoken, yet at the same time we claim to whisper it to ourselves and our friends in ink and breath tones that call to our egos the gentle caress of recognition, the candied words loosened by the other’s tongue: “S/He is a poet.” Still, vagaries plague us in the form of friendship, in the form of intimacy, only this time those who tend to our silence with their words are duped into thinking they have unchained the voice brutalized by the mysterious authority of language, when in fact their remarks float like empty vessels of sound, pop feebly, then settle into a mediocre banter of which the dismissive nature leaves the freshly stroked poet to wander self-consciously through a labyrinth constructed out of self-deception and ignorance. But all is not lost, for silence is not the wilderness and the wilderness is not ignorance.
So what is this procedure tagged “poetry” that intimates such a convoluted silence, and that leads one astray on occasion through a landscape of such proverbial cliché as, “I don’t understand it, but it sounds good.” I would, without the luxury of referential stability, venture to say that it has something to do with confession. The confession I have in mind is not of the religious sort, the kind involving a subaltern’s fiction of regret, rather, this confession is built upon self-knowledge, the use of “I,” whether implied or starkly revealed, in bequeathing to others our most intimate knowledge of language. Poetry, then, is more than an unrelentingly misunderstood word, a substantive of vague proportions – it also points to a verb, the copulative equation of all life: to be. Do not misconstrue what I say, there is not the least bit of Cartesian primitivism in what I intend, for we must remember that confessions are made to be heard by those who will not understand us, by those who will comment upon one’s craft of intimacy or even upon the nature of the procedure without ever having breathed in the sweat of coupling with the image of one’s grammatical self. A confession is of two natures; it speaks of who we are and, to borrow from Aristotle’s “On Interpretation,” unleashes on the world a verb signaling that something is being spoken about. What is being spoken about, in this case, happens to be the articulator of the verb, if not the verb itself.
Why not speak poetry, then, if that is what one does? Why not riddle the uninitiated with the visceral catcalls of one’s poetic nature? Perhaps the world would tire of being peopled by so many conversations that begin with ‘I.” Or perhaps we simply do not want to know about each other. It would be, after all, a difficult task to enter into multiple contracts of pathos with those around us. And what would happen if other poets should start stealing our confessions?
It would seem from my brief account of it that being a poet is fraught with perils: the burden of silence, the deceiving nature of others, the egotistical heresy of confession, in short, the violability one submits to when revealing a tender flesh ripe for ridicule and misunderstanding. So, what can be done to fortify the soft layer of poetry from the hard stares and prodding comments of those unfortunate enough to misconceive the task of confession and its reliance upon an unrelenting silence duly uttered? Nothing, since, to paraphrase from Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, once the deed is done, it is done again, as my life is done… in silence.
Umbriate Press Poetry 