Poetry, language

"...the idea that the word could represent and then deliver into reality what the word symbolized--the possibility of language, of writing, seemed to me magical and basic and irresistible."

(June Jordan, a poet, children's author, dramatist, and essayist.)

Most poets would say the same thing. And most novelists as well. And I agree. Yet I feel sad, or somewhat frustrated, at the same time, for that magical language is really all we have.

I must make an earnest confession. Poetry is not my strong suit. Recently I had to read dozens of poems, and I felt frustrated, alienated.

So, this was my consolation.

That poetry is possible only because language is incomplete, or imperfect.

"the idea that the word could represent..."

I do not wish to delve into, as it were, a Foucauldian discussion of the history of the word and the world, how they were the same, and then the word represented the world, and then signification, even greater alienation between the two.

Regardless, it seems to me that poetry is, again, possible because language is never perfect, never complete. What do you mean? Well, you will never know what she meant. She herself would never be sure that her words translated her meaning correctly.

Poetry is, undoubtedly, powerful. Every word counts. But essentially, the word evokes, rather than means. This is true even for poems seemingly quite straightforward in their meaning. Romantic poems, for instance. They are songs about trees, among other things. But what tree? Wordsworth's tree is not the same with my tree.

"It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving." (John Steinbeck, in the preface to The Forgotten Village.)

This one sentence can lead us to many different discussions, but my interest is in the difference, or rather distance, between the particular and the general.

So, one says she finally understood a poem, that she came to the moment of sudden 'resonance', that her soul and the words is resonating together.

But it is, in fact, like drawing imaginary lines between stars, and thereby producing a certain shape out of a group of them. There is the Big Dipper. Or is it? Why just the seven of them? Why not connect, say, half a dozen stars? And there you have it. Words and a poem.

No, I don't think poetry is a scam. It is, like I said, potent. The grip of a poem is far more vast than that of any passage from a novel composed of the same number of words. But the power of poetry does not come from the words; it comes from the space around the words, the thinly sketched out space that has to be populated by individual histories. Sure, we can (and in many cases actually do) study the life of the poet, what happened to this guy and what happened in the world in general. But, then again, this means that the words are not self-sufficient. Of course they are not. We have a fancy word called intertextuality for that dependency.

So, in the end, I suspected that poetry was really devised to conceal the impossibility of 'making something perfectly clear', of really 'meaning it', by means of language. It is a dumb-down oracle, really. I said it, so you make sense out of it. Then later, people tried to populate the 'empty' space around words by speaking and writing more. The novel.  I'm not sure if we had succeeded in that regard.