Joy in Poetry

The other day I left a note for Sir Gawain, who I hope has many days to come at Heaven Tree before the Green Knight chops off his head. And my little note has made me think about poetry (rather than simply poems) again:

“it’s much more like being met, that some part of us has been recognised” (Armstrong)

Thinking about Rilke and “Archaic Torso of Apollo” once again: the work of art sees us, measures all that is in us that can match and mate with it, and we find ourselves as in a magical mirror that calls us toward transformation. And it seems to me that the upwelling response to a work of art begins our metamorphosis.

And perhaps if one can have enough transformation, the little hard grit of the soul may be washed and washed to pearldom!

I’ve been asking myself why this little matter of poetry concerns me so nearly. Why do I embrace, again and again, certain collections of words, lyric to epic? The older I get, the more I find in certain poems (and stories and paintings and sculpture and so on, though here I am thinking specifically of poems) the sprigs of the tree of life.

1. I rejoice that poetry is intractable and will not be anything other than what it is. You cannot distort a poem; if you try, it will return to its original condition when you are done with your wrongheaded readings and look at you until you are fit to see it properly.

2. I rejoice that you cannot make a movie out of a poem.

3. I rejoice that the yoking of unexpected and even unorthodox things in a poem can still cause a great flowering of joy and wonder and surprise.

4. I rejoice that a poem can take what is foolish, weak, and empty in me and fill and transform by force.

5. I rejoice that poetry is alien to technology. All technology can do is repeat it, as if on a page, sometimes with the addition of images that are more or less pleasing—or read it aloud, as if the poet or another read but with a second-hand setting.

6. I rejoice that a poem's strength made from “a mouthful of air” and even from weak and foolish images.

7. I rejoice that poetry is not useful and cannot make up a part of the body of capitalist economy but floats somewhere out of reach, like a halo.

8. I rejoice that I can get lost in a poem.

9. I rejoice that poetry is a mad, mad pursuit in the current age.

10. I rejoice that poetry has survived Modernism and Postmodernism.

11. I rejoice that it simply doesn’t matter that poetry doesn’t matter to almost everybody.

12. I rejoice that poetry is not politics.

13. I rejoice that poetry measures the height and depth of me.

14. I rejoice that poetry is nakedly mystical and joyful.

15. I rejoice that the best poems cannot be confused with prose by getting rid of the line breaks but have language, rhythm, and sound that is not daily.

16. I rejoice that poetry is made out of the world’s brokenness into a ravishing whole.

17. I rejoice that poetry makes us go to the fount, and that it is worth doing so to get a pail of water, even if we get a broken crown along the way.

18. I rejoice that no matter how long a teacher talks, the soul of a poem cannot be taught.

19. I rejoice that poetry refuses to be quick and easy, that it turns a back on all that is fast in our age, the Fast Age that makes us fast from beauty and the metaphysical.

20. I rejoice that a wonderful poem does not give up all of its secret but remains inexhaustibly, fruitfully strange, even to its maker.

Okay, that’s enough rejoicing! None of those apply to all poems; they don't all apply to each of the poems I love best. But they do give a whole picture, nevertheless.

Image courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and Stefan Kuemmel of Graz, Austria.