| Poetry is a speaking which is excessive to its boundaries and knows little in the way of limits. It is an open confrontation with the mind as the inside of the self. It can be neither good nor bad nor true nor false. It is an original rising of words in time. The self, of course, has no inside and words only exist for the senses or else inside the mind. The mind does not exist in any simple way but stands as the location of thought. In any case, poetry can take place in the mind or in the process of typing words into a computer. But poetry is not really speaking. It is a form of thinking and writing that is subsequently read and often forgotten. But this is not exclusive to poetry. Newspapers are the most forgotten things in the world and nobody is interested in yesterday's news. Poetry might be thought of as memorable language if this didn't make advertisements count as poems. Poems can be spoken and might be heard in the inner ear of the reader. Poems do have an acoustic dimension but this doesn't turn them into signifiers. Poetry is open because its meaning is incorrigible. But this is not necessarily the case. It may instead be that a poem is very one-dimensional or direct or clear. This can obviously be to the poet's advantage. A clear poem is not necessarily a closed poem. It is also not true that poems are neither good nor bad. Every poem is either good or bad and thinking makes it so. Still, the tribunal that would decide its ultimate status can never be convened, and will never make a final ruling. A poem must, in fact, be examined by many judges. And they will have varying tastes. Even if a poem is rejected by a hundred editors it might still have a life to come. It might be unpalatable because it is untimely. But it is probably unpalatable because it is in bad taste. There are many neglected poems circulating now that might be well-regarded in the future. Many will never be read. Internet poems may well disappear completely when their host site ceases to function. There may well be a type of poetry which is more like a conversation and especially suited to the internet. A method suggests itself here. Ejournals ask for poems to be included in the body of emails. Poems can be written in these emails and sent away without being saved anywhere else. They are written quickly and are not intended to be monolithic. If the editor loses the email submission they will only be saved in the sent list of the author's mail system. If they are deleted from this list they will be gone forever. If the poem is very bad this will be all to the good. Given that most poems are bad it is surely a good idea for an author to welcome the possibility that his or her poem will be obliterated even if they think it is good at the time. Poems like this might even be inadvertently cut short when the author tries to tab a margin space but instead sends the poem. It is questionable whether these language games are poetic at all. Perhaps they are poetic because the author fashions them with the intention that they be regarded as poems. Perhaps the publication to which they are being sent calls itself a poetry journal. These are social or institutional issues that bring language into regimes of meaning, which is where it always belongs. Questions of labelling, interpretive communities and the limits to nomenclature will always leave us with the silent thing. Naturally enough all poems exist for a fraction of the human world and do not exist in any meaningful way to the non-human world. That they are not known does not reduce their existence. Their existence is absolute even when they are known to only one man. It is certainly the case now that poems can take almost any form. But they must still be poetic, which is to say they should not read like a bureaucratic report or a piece of financial advice even if they may mimic these genres. There is of course the man or woman who calls themselves a poet and may even be thought of in those terms by others. But the significance of self-identity or of externally identified status is questionable. There is silence and there is thought and there is the sound of keys being pushed. Poetry happens when this is happening but it also needs a reader. Theoretically, a poem could be a poem without being thought as much by anyone. There could be such a thing as an accidental poem. Poems take place when words are subjected to extreme discernment. A poem can be written quickly but even as it is, the words that make it up are scrutinised and winnowed. The path through the linguistic universe is the poet's navigation. In his or her mind there are a lot of words and they can, in principal, be combined in a lot of ways. Basic rules of language guide the process of selection and ordering but there is also a motive force at work that it mysterious and elusive. Poetic thinking is thinking in words but it can also often be the translation of images into words. The words themselves are also nothing but images that make more or less sense or are more or less pleasurable to read. Poems are the right words in the right order but the right words must, by definition, be in the right order. If they are in the wrong order, they are probably the wrong words. Could it not be that the syntax is right but the diction is wrong? The wrong words in the right order sounds dubious. Well may we say that a poem is the right words and leave it gently at that. | |