Poetry Keeps Its Secrets

Think about Poetry as a raw material –  a bar of pure metal which is physically pulled or “drawn” through increasingly narrow die openings until it becomes wire fine enough to vibrate at a musical frequency. Normal daily speech does not easily tolerate the level of stress required for this kind of precision.

Poetry uses the same words as prose narrative, but because the majority of its work in the world deals with processing the most extreme human emotions, a poem goes through a great deal of pressure as it is being drawn, and may occasionally kick up into a kind of spontaneous descant, beyond control by the rational mind, and lasting just long enough to bring about a new relationship in the world that was previously absent.

Poetry is partly a language unto itself, hmmm yes. . . .but which language? Poems can be translated from one human speech to another, but what were Poetry's own very first words?

 There are hints. Listen to this from Monica Gagliano, a plant-communication specialist who is one of an increasing number of scientists who have “gone over” to Poetry in order to find the vocabulary & metaphors they need to continue accurately documenting their work. (From her book Thus Spoke the Plant):

“Oryngham means thank you for listening in the language of the plants. It is not a word, as we humans understand it, because its meaning cannot be spoken – nor can it be heard. . . .When we learn to listen to plants without the need to hear them speak, a language that we have forgotten emerges; it is a language beyond words.”

Here linguist and translator George Steiner in his book After Babel, is complimenting Shakespeare for intuitively understanding that individual words truly do not have definition outside of the full context of whatever surrounding words they are temporarily thrown into contact with.

“The meshing of adulteration with adultery would be characteristic of Shakespeare's total responsiveness to the field of relevant force and intimation in which words conduct their complex lives.”

In her book Nay, Rather, translator Anne Carson mentions a word in Homer's Odyssey even the poet himself did not translate any further than to bring it across with only its ancient Greek pronunciation to guard it from becoming revealed. Although the single-syllable word seems to refer to a plant that is probably a nightshade, Carson makes no attempt to draw a correlation with a real plant, since, as she says,

“[this word] is one of several allusions in Homer's poems to a language apparently known only    to gods. .  . He wants this word to fall silent.”

There is a sense building here, not only of plants as conscious beings with their own method of communication, but also that words themselves can be said to dwell in their own world, sharing much with us, but not everything. I ran across this same idea in a fantasy novel by Oregon-born (and recently deceased) author Patricia A. McKillip. She's referring to the long and arduous years of memorizing and translating that the ancient Irish bards went through: (from The Bards of Bone Plain)

“. . .he was learning daily the peculiar, poignant turmoil of the simplest, most common of words.”

So, words have their own world; plants have their own secret language, and Poetry is the closest we humans ever get to either. What a challenge! What a joy!

I'll close with a rare example of a poem where the poet is so addled by his original image that he steps aside almost in bewilderment, and allows the process to take its own course, rather than trying to describe his way out of his overwhelmed state. Brodkey manages to open a space for Poetry to come in like an interior decorator, to select and juxtapose some words which, in a normal, rational sequence might sound like just one damned thing after another.

April Fools' Day, New York State

The ignorant daffodil white-and-yellow-light
gravel white, fool's gold,
the rough grass and ignorant air –

The gas station
in the blessed yellow air.
The horse in the snow-spotted mud in a stupor,
half-gilded (half-black with spring shadow),
in a pasture just beyond the gas station,
horse heat, horse hooves,
the slats of a fence cartwheeling in collapse
on the pitch and heave of a seemly hill,
thin and giddy birds wheeling
in the damp and piercing toil of blond light,
belfry light, the perfumed toll,
the blond light on the last day of existence
of the snow: the odor in the shadows
is the cold snow that just melted
in the marsh hollow, new ferns.
black, damp, resinous locusts
shivering in premonition.

In air the color of a saxophone,
in blond, childish April light,
the heavy saxophone air, the tubes
of warm air set among the cold, the tulip rim
with its breath of the riff to come,
the emotional weeks of floral giddy-ready
begin again, begin again.

--Harold Brodkey