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Let us begin by recognizing that one comes to a poem -- or ought to come- -in openness and expectancy and acceptance. For a poem is an adventure, for both the poet and the reader: a venture into the as yet-unseen, the as-yet unexperienced. At the heart of it is the not knowing. It is search.
It is discovery. It is existence entered. 'You are lost the instant you know what the result will be, 's ays the painter Juan Gris, speaking or and to painters. But what he is speaking of is true of art in general, is as appropriate to poetry as to painting. What he is reminding us of is the need to remain open to discovery, to largess -- the need to give over our desire to define, to interpret, to reduce, to translate, We need to remind ourselves, in short, that in a poem we find the world happening not as concept but as percept. It is the world happening.
The world becoming. The world allowed to be -- itself. Another way of putting the same thing, this time from the per-selective of thinking (the perspective of the mind in its engagement of the world), would be to say that the poem is an enactment of thinking itself: the mind in motion. Not merely a collection of thoughts, but rather the act of thought itself, the mind in action. The poem is not trying to be about something, it is trying to be something.
It is trying to incorporate, to realize. Not ideas about the thing, writes Wallace Stevens, but the thing itself. As Denise Levertov has said, 'The substance, the means, of an art, is am incarnation -- not reference but phenomenon. ' This is of course what gives to poetry, to good poetry, a feeling of aliveness. Touch its body -- the body of this particular 'thinking' -- and you will feel it pulse with hidden life. Which in a sense is much the same as saying that it will pulse with mystery. For what is more mysterious than the fact of life?
I mean life actually encountered, its own self-sustaining presence. What greater difference than that between a living being and the corpse of that being, the life gone out of it? One moment it is a living presence of mystery. The next, it is something completely other, something best defined by absence, by what is not there.
I can never get over it. At every moment I am astonished by it. Touch by it. Awed by it.
Perhaps that facts, as much as any, is why I am a poet, why I have to keep searching for verbal bodies the mystery can be present in, where that hidden life of the planet we are part of can be seen again. Can be heard again. Touched again. And perhaps that reason, as much as any, is why we need poetry, have to have it, have to keep coming back to it. What we are talking about is the world's physical presence. And about our inevitable entanglement in it -- our minds, our bodies.
About the inexplicable capacity of words to embody the mystery of it. To actually embody it. Not just stand for it, or point to it, or suggest it: but somehow to be it. It is this quality of language -- of words -- that poetry, throughout history, has sworn its allegiance to. In this respect, poetry is not so much a defining as a revealing.
It recognizes the inherent mingling of the spiritual and the physical- -that is, the metaphoric nature of the world (or; as the Romantics would have said, the metaphoric nature of Nature). That is to say, it recognizes (or feels, or intuits, or perceives) that the world both is and means. And that language both is and means. And that for us -- human being -- languages is involved in both aspects of it: both the being and the meaning. And this is what we must give ourselves to when we come to a poem. Most of the things we do to and with the external world have ulterior motives, have uses they wish to serve.
And to this extent they are unwilling, or unable, to allow the world simply to be. Likewise language- -always a part of our involvement in that world -- is a part of our daily commerce with the world of use and purpose, of management and manipulation, of reduction and partiality. Poetry is where language can be released again into the fullest of its nature. Into its participation in the mystery. Into, in short, its metaphoric life. Likewise, poetry is where the world is allowed to be -- independent of any designs we may have on it, any merely self-serving ends -- and where, therefore, it is allowed to have inherent meaning.
But poetry is always more that mere meaning, more than mere use. Meaning is merely a familiar morphological structure it shares with other experiences of language. And use -- well, use is of our species' favorite categories of identification and valuation. One of its most impressive, of course. And also one of its most destructive. Both the medevac helicopter and the inevitable series of oil spills.
Poetry knows use in both its guises, embodies it in its contrariety. Poetry, I suggest to you, has no designs on the world. Rather it manifests the desire (the need) to be at one with the world (which is to say, atonement: at-one-ment). A longing to be whole.
To be unified with. To be reunited with. To be alive again to the world's living. To be alive to language's mysterious participation in that living. To enter the depth of it, the quiver of it, the dark knowledge the body has of if -- its respiratory involvement in the rhythms of it: the music of being.
What does this tell us about the close reading of poems, and about writing about poems? Well, it tells us something about what not to do, something about how not to approach a poem. But more importantly. it gives us some sense of where we might look as we try to talk to ourselves about the journey the poems is.
An uncertain sense, to be sure (we are after all trying to talk about something that has mystery at the heart of it, and mystery is by definition not susceptible to explanation or solution) -- but a sense nonetheless. We recognize that what we want most in a poem is the feeling that it has life in it, something that is not expressible by mere 'writing. ' Consider Mary Oliver's poem 'Spring': In April the Morgan was bred. I was chased away. I heard the cries of the horse where I waited, And the laughter of the men. Later the farmer who owned the stallion Found me and said, 'She's done. You tell your daddy he owes me fifty dollars. ' I rode her home at her leisure And let her, wherever she wanted, Tear with her huge teeth, roughly, Blades from the fields of spring.
Always the question for art is, it seems to me, how to make the moment existential, how to make it a living moment of the world. Here Mary Oliver listens, with her poem, to the great echo in the blood the seasons and the irresistible drive of sex make together. We enter it and we feel it, its deep pulse and motion. Our bodies ripple with their dark knowledge of it, the rhythms we share together on the earth, their great ease and fulfillment, the delicate violence the flesh is heir to. And of course there is the poem's eloquent, silent recognition (made not so much by the speaker as in and through her): namely, the kinship of flesh and flesh, the awesome mystery our shared physical life is. And here is Oliver's poem 'Winter Trees': First it was only the winter trees -- their boughs eloquent at midnight with small but mortal explosions, and always a humming under the lash...
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