A Theory of Poetry

A THEORY OF POETRY

This first poem, Painting, seeks to express a philosophy of poetic composition:

PAINTING

Let us paint the hours of the day.

Morning is swimming pool blue

Tinctured with blown ash,

Pink gloaming

Touched by wisps of smoke;

Noon, phosphorus exploding

Blindingly, silently;

Dusk, iron oxides

Diverse as vegetables;

Night, plush sable,

Milky white, the moon.

Each word is pigment squeezed from a tube

Onto a palette of infinite possibilities.

Meaning would be unremembered

But for a picture.

Experience is meaningless

But for a symbol.

Deft brushstrokes write freshly.

Words are left to dry.

Among the particular attractions of poetry is its special capacity to create a unified experience or image so that the poem achieves an iconic or symbolic quality.

This iconic or symbolic quality is achieved in part because poetry is laconic, spare, and sometimes minimalist. In a poem, every word matters.

Often as well poetry is focused on communicating a unified experience or on constructing an image. In this respect, a poem possesses a likeness to an icon or a symbol.

Poems as icons or symbols function as the vehicle for a larger meaning beyond the poem itself.

The poem Painting invokes this iconic or symbolic function of poetry:

Meaning would be unremembered

But for a picture.

Experience is meaningless

But for a symbol.

Moreover, the poem relates poetry as icon or symbol to the dependence of human cognition on the image or symbol. Human understanding—unless we are speaking of pure intuition or mystical experience—is mediated by the image or symbol.

Consequently, one of the purposes of poetry, according to the philosophy of composition set forth in the poem Painting, is to create an icon or symbol that stands for a meaning larger than the poem itself.

Crowsnest Mountain

The following two poems, for example, attempt to realize this philosophy. The Mountain and The River are intended to be iconic and symbolic. (In order to sidestep copyright issues, I selected my own poems to illustrate my ideas.)

THE MOUNTAIN

           

Climbing is like lifting a weight, hand over hand, using a pulley. Marathoner in a trance, you ascend rapidly as time slows to near motionlessness.

Trees rustle, rice husks pushing back and forth to dry. Desiccated brush, smallish bundles, tumble downward, roll about. Bamboo thickets, agitated brooms, shiver.

Dislodged by your feet, tiny stones hurtle, soaring arcs increasing in velocity downhill, click-clacking glass marbles knocking together, gradually fading, scattering into silence.

At this height air is rarefied fire. Atop the mountain birds hover overhead, transfixed by the sun more brilliant than a sorcerer’s spell, flanked by clouds, bright balls of electricity.

Strong gusts sand your face roughly, a stone. The wind is cold, the eye of an ascetic just returned from a visit to the dead, fiercely gazing, an eagle clutching a small animal.

The vast plain below mirrors the sky, wet paddies flashing crystal polygons, jewelry turning side to side. Far into the distance, short hills squat, huge emerald droplets, whilst the river, a glittering bracelet, empties into an ocean of light.

Breathless, you are a broken wheel on the wayside. You will climb the mountain again, spellbound by the expenditure of controlled energy, delighted by the sting of sharp gravel underfoot.

The title, “The Mountain,” signals the symbolic character of the poem, insofar as the mountain is a major symbol in world culture. Mountains are Judaeo-Christian symbols of the spiritual journey, for example; Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb, and Mount Thabor are all sacred sites of Judaism, Christianity, or both. Biblically, they are places of encounter with the Divinity.

Similarly, recurring throughout the Cold Mountain poems of China is a preoccupation with natural beauty, of which the poet’s description of his experience of the vistas of Cold Mountain, traversed by Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist streams, is an allegory, understated, of the spiritual journey.

The central motif in The Mountain is emphasized in two ways particularly. First, the poem narrates the ascent up a mountain, thereby extending the poet’s account. Second, the poem dwells on the ascent using vividly descriptive details—“agitated brooms,” “bright balls of electricity,” “huge emerald droplets.”

Simplicity heightens the dominant motif. Undistracted by sub-plots or digression, the story of the ascent manifests the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action (not that the unities are required).

Readily, we perceive in the ascent a metaphor for a universal human experience, that of the journey toward a goal, not always spiritual, at least in part often so, always involving some degree of difficulty and notable expenditure of effort, blessed with success, sometimes. This journey recurs throughout life: “You will climb the mountain again.”

Woonasquatucket River

When I wrote The River (below), I had in mind a symbol of the world in time. (The reader will no doubt interpret the poem differently.)

THE RIVER

Yesterday the river was lapping at my feet like an old man tapping out a message about time flowing downward from hills remote as hawks.

Today he rises slowly, a momentous pulse pushing seaward, fed by faraway pistons.

At the waterside where air is fresh as a pear, a sweet mist glides forward like a perfumed wrist.

Islands of floating plants drift, joining into continents, rearranging in serpentine tattoos.

Beneath the surface glittery like so many exploding firecrackers, fish swirl, shadowy limbs of an athlete smoothly cutting back and forth.

Denizens gather at the riverbanks in spoonfuls, sprinkling laughter farther than droplets shot from spinning umbrellas.

Distantly a lizard pokes its head into the sun, jerking left and right, vainly divining a future obscured by brightness.

Similar to The Mountain, The River dwells on a motif salient in world culture. Many great civilizations originated along fertile riverbanks—Indian along the Indus and Ganges, Chinese along the Yellow and Yangtze, Sumerian along the Tigris and Euphrates, Egyptian along the Nile, or Roman along the Tiber—so that rivers naturally invoke mythic attributes. The river in the poem is a symbol.

The River narrative is far more diminished than that of The Mountain. For a brief, ostensibly uninterrupted period of time, the poet describes his visual panorama of the river, almost magical in its unreality.

The River, like The Mountain, dwells on drawn out, vividly descriptive details in order to highlight the central motif, the river—“air is fresh as a pear,” “serpentine tattoos,” “so many exploding firecrackers.”

Implied in the first and last lines is the river as a metaphor for flowing time. The first line says that yesterday the river was lapping like “time flowing downward,” that is, from the past. The last line describes a lizard jerking to and fro, unsuccessfully attempting to divine the future.

Thank you, reader, for sharing my poems and my ideas about poetry. 

Originally published in IthacaLit (September 27, 2014)