An interesting idea to continue to try and extrapolate and expand on:
In America we burn up ideas too quickly. We get rid of them by immediately putting them into practice. We only know one thing to do with an idea: apply it; convert it into something useable. And it dies right there in the conversion. It loses generative power. (James Hillman, pg, 142 We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world’s getting worse.)
What is the goal in 60 pages or more?1 Or the goal in this or that composition? Probably, most importantly, to generate ideas; expand rather than contract thought. Allow space for thoughts to flourish, to move like clouds thru a last gasp summer sky. Though, I’m probably being a bit overeager (optimistic?). When one has the seed for a poem, derived from experience and curiosity and the insight therefrom, one is eager to share it. How one puts it on paper, in what vessel it goes out into the world, we call form and technique and style; these are the strokes we use to define the maters of the craft. If one means to convey only this experience and share this insight, then we end up with a concretized version of the story, meant to draw the same conclusion. Thus, a vehicle (the poem) for ideas, provocation, expansion (which, I’d like to note, expansion is not always a good thing) becomes a sludge (byproduct of human activity); a very specific tool with a very specific purpose.
Perhaps a note here is appropriate to say that the point of writing this is to compare and contrast the above statement with the writing, the poetry, that I seem to be writing at this moment in time. I hope to, over the course of a few short essays, also find some useful concepts and ideas to take with me and maybe you as well.
Why wouldn’t it begin with approach (intent), process and exhaustion (giving up)?
No poem is a good idea. None of these poems are useful, practical or immediately applicable. Yet I pursue. The poem is not the application of an idea. It is the way in which some people choose to share and consume ideas. The poem is not always information. I tend to believe it has become associated with insight or inspiration, these two terms are concrete ways of saying this idea I had is useful. But what if I take the seed thought/ insight/ inspo that initiated the poem and cut it into little pieces? or refracted it through some process like leaping2, making it kaleidoscopic, something entirely different, or nothing at all? Rather than passing the baton toward the end of the poem where in a climatic stroke I stand tall and exhibit my thought/ conclusion/ insight for you to gain some sort of clarity. Now I am closer to a physician or clinical psychologist than a poet.
What I really want is to share this or that idea/ feeling, but more importantly, I want you (the reader) to share in the delight. I want for you to leave the poem, bitesized as it is, wanting to look for a simple delight (or despair) of your own.
An idea is generative, the poem or insight is cumulative, and yes insights are also generative. Insights lead one to pursue a course of action, and can act like a good idea. The problem is that insights do not transfer as ideas do. You cannot read someone’s insights and have the same insight yourself. You can be illuminated to this new worldview, you now grasp the concept, but you do not have the insight. To gain that you must have the experience to go with it, that leads to it. While reading is an experience and can lead to feeling like being slapped in the face or punched in the gut, it is not being slapped in the face or punched in the gut. And so rarely leads to transformational intelligence. Reading can point you down the path but in order for something to happen you have to walk down the path.
So, I stay away from the great insight poem. I write abstract, in cubist form. I don’t mean to be the next great poet of a nation. I mean to make you giggle, tickled by the excitement of what else language can do.
- I say 60 pages, rather than focus on something that is more relevant to what SCP publishes, because the idea of a full length is something that has been on my mind with my own writing lately. ↩︎
- Concept initiated by Robert Bly (Looking for Dragon Smoke) wherein the poem is marked by sudden shifts from conscious imagery or ideas to unconscious images. ↩︎
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