On the Despair of Creation

"Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images."
--Aristotle (On Interpretation)

"Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions
of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak
of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to
which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of
them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral
strains, another epic or iambic verses- and he who is good at one is
not good any other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing,
but by power divine."
-Plato (Ion Dialogue)

So I find myself at a new juncture. On one level I am committed to the task of poetry, but conversely I have reached a new despair in the act of of poetry. By act of poetry I mean that way in which poetry acts as a verb, performing specific but abstract functions in the act of living. I am quite certain that everything I say I agree with the moment I say it, but five minutes or five hours or five days later I cannot commit to whatever utterance I have made. Is this the way all "artists" exist? Perhaps, and perhaps it is a fool's task to attempt any sort of conviction. As Allen Grossman has it: "Art is about something the way a cat is about the house."

I guess the frustration is the experience of trying to hold onto water. It is also compounded today (my sullenness in the moment) by a comment I received in a workshop last week, which should not bother me, that "poetry is most resonant intellectually & emotionally if you wed a better mix of images/metaphor & abstraction." This statement bothers me for a few reasons. First, it ignores my project and secondly (concurrent with the first) it is a supposition that there is a 'good' way to write poetry. Now, I am definitely aware of my disposition to make blanket statements, so far be it from me to, in good faith, dismiss this statement as gibberish. And though I find it obnoxious, the redemption is that it got me to return to thinking about what my project is. So I am going to outline that here, if only for my self-serving needs of writing it down, and to hopefully engage some sort of dialogue with whoever is reading this.

First and foremost, I am Aristotelian in the idea that all language is inherently metaphor and metaphor, as a trope, is in play whenever language is used. Secondly, all language is abstract, oblique. To assume that one can use language to get closer to the natural world is a fallacy of thought. Rhetoric is constructed, and necessarily, though regressive, it constructs us to a large extent. But I cannot help believe that there is a part of us that is not the result of social/linguistic construction, the emotional/animal core that drives us to pure feeling. Because we do not understand this we try to create metaphorical construction, through poetry, narrative, whatever, to try to express and define what we cannot define. If it were possible to do so, we would not continue to create. We all have similar experiences with emotion, but the situations in which emotion arise are different, explicitly or subtly, and they drive us to create in order to help ourselves contain the overwhelming flux and try to contain it in stasis.

For some, this manifests into poems about empty houses, fish-markets, walks in the woods, but this is not how I experience the world of writing. "My lover's eyes are nothing like the sun," I think somebody once said, but they are the most visible manifestation of desire, they represent my desire, her beauty, her understanding, her questioning, her desire, her whatever else (I could fill the internet with how they make me feel). The point is, these are all abstract concepts, but they can be understood by everybody, I don't need a solid image in the physical construction of my lover's eyes, I can be honest and clear only in abstraction.

This is what leads me to my new ideas about the power of poetry in performative culture (and I don't mean the Judith Butler type of performativity). This is how abstraction meets the world of immediacy. I really haven't flushed this out well enough to say much now, but I do believe the future of poetry's cultural relevance lies within the realm of performance and/or the physical and visual field of experience.

When Plato speaks of the muse, I speak of pure emotion. The not-well-understood realm of instinct and creation that is spawned from those moments of consciousness that the world becomes most clear, if only for a brief moment.