Poetry
Poetry is inspired song. The breath is the soul of the poem. The poet gathers the air around, the blue from the sky and her curling eyes, the warmth from the sun and his lover's body . . . and sings. The air is measured, the lover's body rolls with the waves and her eyes become one with the night. In the morning, the poet crawls out of the sky like a bear, stretching full out, searching again for the sweetness, searching in the movement of cloud and leaf and desire. He sings. If his words resound in skin and bone, in the stone-cold night, if he enchants the air with his song -- it is poetry.
Metaphor
Metaphor is the mystery. The poetic act is both a participation in and apprehension of that mystery. A poem may affect us by its lyricism and its passion, by its matching sound with sense -- but without metaphor and the mystery it confers, poetry belongs solely to the decorative or rhetorical arts. It is by metaphor that a poem draws us back again and again to trace the lines that lead to the heart of being and to ourselves.
The Meaning of a Poem
The meaning of a poem comes not from the words, but from the transmutation that occurs in the heart of the poet at the time the poem is written. In all poetry that is not simply decorative, there is an elemental activity of consciousness, a sustained golden moment that triumphs over raw experience. The meaning of a poem is that activity of mind, triumphant over the despair that the words of the poem may convey.
The poem that follows has elicited the dreaded no comment except from one good friend who did me the kindness of asking about the word ‘gimble'. Nevertheless, I continue to enjoy the poem as if it were written by someone else for whom poetry brings into view such beauty that we but suffer the more for its absence. It is a backward way of praising poetry. That’s what I think antipoetry is doing. Anyway, here is the worthless little bit of a stinker in its final ode-rous form. Hold your nose . . . . .
Poetry Stinks
Poetry gives us just enough of what is real
to make us howl and gimble in the night,
too far from moon and what is our fate
To make it right. It stinks a lot!
At Seventy-Two
As I have grown older, I have plunged into language as though I were one of Melville's Catskill eagles. Poetry has given me a kind of second sight that sustains me in the dark places and makes me invisible in the light. Now, at seventy-two, poetry is leading me into a deeper knowledge: to be truly alive means to experience myself as essentially compounded of earth and wind and all other living things. It all breathes fire. I now want more than words. I seek to understand simile and metaphor as reality itself. Man is as much wolf as wind, as much rain as mind and so I would be. I know that I am approaching the age of oblivion whose plentitude is ALL, an empty mirror that is yet full of life. What I tell my students is that to be truly alive is to strive passionately for one’s own truth. My truth is the poetry of mind and heart and of Being itself.
Translating sound into verse
When the wind spoke to me to this morning, it was laughing, another time it was oracular, at another like the whisper of one lover to another. How are we to represent these sounds? The laughter was a flutter of leaves, the prophecy the swoop of eagle fast upon its prey, the whisper a vanishing ‘yes’. In these different sounds I hear a flute, a waterfall and the new moon's own shy, silvery voice. The sound of all of these is translated into images and may be represented as phlooooemmmm. Let those who are not poets worry about onomatopoeia. Poets are more resourceful translators.