Poetry Scribblings

Too many devices in poetry now seems to me to be ignorance of the thing itself we want to pursue and embrace with poetry. In a world full of devices, the greatest and most honest poetry now has to be deviceless, without devices.

*

The beginning of a poem is necessarily the beginning of a world, even if that poem’s beginning talks about the destruction of the world. It is not necessary, though, that with the poem’s ending the world of the poem ends too. That is decided by something else entirely.

*

Poetry is not only about summoning our most primal emotions, but also turning them inside out, making us want to laugh where we would otherwise cry, and sob and wail where we would otherwise saunter by with lightness and gaiety.

*

Whenever we sense a saving element in anything, we are sensing the poetry in the thing. For it is poetry that saves.

*

Poets so often behave as though they are merely responding to a world, whether a hellish one or a heavenly one or some dull miracle in between. While actually poets are crators of worlds themselves into which others are thrusted, in which others have to live, to which others then have to respond. Poets may claim and feign to live in these worlds, but more often than not they have already passed by these worlds for altogether other otherworlds. The might as well as the smallness of poetry is its constant transcending of worlds. Any flit of the imagination can become a world, from giant multicolored canopies to specks of dust. With poetry, worldlessness itself can become a world and we might dwell there for eons. There are always greater worlds and smaller worlds, worlds beyond worlds and worlds within worlds, and there is no stopping poetry from impossibly visiting them all.

*

The power of silence is a power present in every poem, no matter how garrulous.

*

Poetry is unstoppable. The end of all things themselves does not stop poetry. While we are here and while we ourselves are going and running, our task is to–dream up the unstoppable.

*

Our friends within our readers are those that bear the nonsense within us as much as they bear the sense. Our greatest friends among them are those that relish this nonsense as much as or more than the sense–because it is as beautiful. More beautiful. Poets know this most of all. For they have learned it the hard way–but effortlessly.

*

In the poem not a single living being was alive. Now every living being is forced to ask whether it is in fact living.

*

I love when a philosopher is also a poet, for then I can be confident that the philosophy breathes with lungs of flesh and not some fantastical ventilator.

*

There is no one who ever wrote one true poem and then stopped. Once you write a true poem, you cannot stop and have to write and write again. Never having written a true poem and seeking to do so can do the same, and set you on an unending course. Just as mocking truth through poetry. We are all writers, then, but sometimes it is truth that has us write, sometimes it is lack of truth.

*

Poetry is useless. The stupidity of poems that are used for what most things are used for today–the military and militaristic money-grabbing–shows this even more amply. Poetry more puts to use than it is used. And even this is questionable. For a child who plays with a ball is not “using” the ball, at least not if he is really playing.

*

Oftentimes poets are unsure what to feel at the time something happens. That is most likely because they are remembering some immemorial feeling, or anticipating some unheard-of one.

*

The poems of our lives are unfinished things. They are finished for us afterwards, usually after we have left life.

*

What poetry does for our lives is it releases the grandeur and the terrible nastiness of our lives, and everything in between, in the form of a work out into the world. And there it finds its playground and spreads its riddles to all the corners and crannies of life, making sure that all the living are infected with similar grandeur and nastiness and the things in between.

*

Is there really a divide among human beings in the realm of poetry? Or is poetry rather the lasting establishment of the human family, one of the few things we can float upon in the sea of our questions regarding who we are?

*

If poetry turns to being written by machines, there will still be secret poems hidden away in our hearts. If poetry then turns to being written by beings sentient but other than us, that poetry will still be other than ours, and our own poetry will still be worth both hiding and revealing.

*

Poetry falls to us like the stars fall into our sight on different nights. Some nights the clouds cover them. Some nights they are so brilliant that you cannot ignore them. Some nights they are there, shining brightly or dimly you will never know, for you forget to look up. Or refuse.

*

There is a poetics of everything, even of the realm consisting of the void, the lack of wonder, the lack of fantasy and imagination and magic. There is a poetics of catastrophe and final disaster. Again a poetics of all things, insofar as even the most dispersed must be gathered somehow for the showing, for the happening.

*

The unwritten, undevised poems certain humans will sing at the end of human time are still poems, whether or not anyone hears them or reads them–up to and including whether or not they are sung.

*

What did that moon that shows up in so many of your poems ever do for you, but force you to dream of it time and again, enslaving you into fantasizing about that rock all and sundry things?

*

It’s the poems people love the most that I barely feel I have written. No, those poems have to have come from someplace else.

*

It’s a shame if, when a poet feels they should be sitting down to listen to the gods and they only hear the dogs, they refrain from singing or from writing anything down.