Truth
In my poorly-informed understanding, poetry is an attempt to write truth. Truth on the subjects of poetry is not possible to write in steady prose, because the subjects of poetry are the things that happen within the mind -- things of motion and variability, sensual rather than factual meaning. One might say that a good novel has the same subjects; of course it is true, and a novel can be full of poetry. This is because poetry works by seeking epiphany -- bringing the writer's and reader's minds into a temporary, even fleeting, alignment. In fact it is a sharing of visions, of inhabiting other minds, made possible by the recognition by the reader of the truth in the words because of his or her own experience, imagined experience or sympathy.
As for the poet, he or she has to struggle to be truthful, to distil into arrangements of words and pauses a recognisable facsimile of a vision or insight. In this task, the poet is aided by the immense depth that all words have, the great range of their content accreted with time and usage.
Few things can beat the tremendous rush of grace that comes with a great line. I still thrill at the first few lines of Eliot's 1917 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (after the Italian), even though I don't understand all of the poem. It's all about potential. And here is a line from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who was persecuted by Stalin, quoted by the wonderful (and often poetic) Michael Dirda of the Washington Post's Book World. Shorn of its context, but presumably about her suffering.
'That was when the ones who smiled/Were the dead, glad to be at rest.'
As for the poet, he or she has to struggle to be truthful, to distil into arrangements of words and pauses a recognisable facsimile of a vision or insight. In this task, the poet is aided by the immense depth that all words have, the great range of their content accreted with time and usage.
Few things can beat the tremendous rush of grace that comes with a great line. I still thrill at the first few lines of Eliot's 1917 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (after the Italian), even though I don't understand all of the poem. It's all about potential. And here is a line from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who was persecuted by Stalin, quoted by the wonderful (and often poetic) Michael Dirda of the Washington Post's Book World. Shorn of its context, but presumably about her suffering.
'That was when the ones who smiled/Were the dead, glad to be at rest.'
posted by frantyck at 11:13 PM
4 Comments:
I love the way you express these ideas. Your blogpost also brought out an epiphany of sorts, about poetry and why we react to it often more emotionally than to prose.
Truth! The illusory, the ethereal, the unsaid and the unsayable.
Poetry, inasmuch as it is a natural outburst of emotion that doesn’t have to be hemmed in by the constraints of prosaic grammar, has perhaps a deeper connection with our soul than prose (as is generally written). Emotions seep through the spaces between words in sentences before we know it. But poetry is more liquid, nebulous, allowing us (and others) a glimpse of our own refracted selves before it slips away from the hand, leaving us with the feeling of having held something, but not knowing quite what it was.
SHOULD the truth ever be told? Words clothe our feelings. Standing naked in front of the world, hoping that someone will understand us, is not something we often wish to do. What if they laugh? What if they kill our souls? We need the comfort of words as defence: we create our walls of language. Poetry is the best-possible compromise, perhaps, allowing us to share ourselves without being completely exposed to cruelties. Take, for instance, 'Prufock'. Eliot dedicated the poem to a dead friend, and in the epigraph quotes from Inferno, where a man speaks his heart out to Dante only because he believes Dante to be one of the dead who'll never return to Earth to repeat what was said. This, more than anything, points to the dangers of telling the truth (or of trying to tell the truth, anyway).
CAN the truth ever be told? To return where I began, if (good) poetry (like all great art, I suppose) stirs the elemental within ourselves and joins the poet with the reader in an empathetic understanding, it is so because of the liberties taken with language; which allow it to hold on to the emotions for a while before they finally slip through. But so far as it needs to be SAID, to be WRITTEN, poetry must use words. And words not only allow us to hide; the limitations of our tongues, letters, syllables, grammar, and so on, prevent us from ever being able to relate the truth (if we know it) through words. The truth can perhaps never be spoken, because in the very act of verbalizing, it is lost.
Weren’t there sages in ancient India who never spoke? Isn’t meditation about silence? Is Alzheimer’s an unconscious forgetting of words caused by a deeper knowledge of ourselves and of the world? Which cannot be understood by most of us, and therefore must be pathologized?
I disagree with the earlier post...sometimes hiding behind a smokescreen of words, while allowing us to be comfortable and secure, leads to the loss of that we crave most and we are left with a feeling of what might have been. Truth is the courage to stand up for what we believe in... be it in poetry or in life. There comes a time when it is necessary to stand naked in front of the world and declare who we are and dare it to laugh at us.
Or perhaps we get the sense of poetry being closer to the 'truth' than prose simply because we savour those words more. We return to words, lines, phrases, and hold, taste and savour them in a manner we rarely do with prose.
Pop-art became art only when we stared long enough to see it as 'art'. Phrases become poetic only when we stop long enough to appreciate it.
"The brotherhood of man is built on a bedrock of kitsch" Milan Kundera
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