Finding Poetry in the Everyday

What is poetry but wonderment? A convergence of displaced words that describe the understanding of a need for speech as a response to a stimulus that is all but discernable in its essence of meaning by a vocabulary determined centuries before the potential item of discernment manifested into a poem. Capiche?

Words always have been for playing, to me. Poetry is a reflection of a playful spirit. This to me is the essence of poetry’s big bang. Not the heady importance of what the poem could mean, but the experience of the poem, the language that (if we are attuned to imagination) defies and describes the very thing that captures our attention in the first place: sunlight; behavior; a pretty girl; a heckler in the crowd.

Poems can obviously be written about anything, in any style (verse, blank form, as an experiment using mathematics or shreds of newsprint). But what a poem embodies is the discovery of moment, that race of blood to the intellectual muscle when one experiences an idea, concern, joy, sympathy, curiosity.

What a poem is not is an uncaptured moment – whether kept private in one’s heart or publicized in words – it must be appreciated to be truly experienced.

How you come to that is simple. It involves two tools you already have: a direct relationship with the tangible world; and at least some level of awareness that this relationship with the tangible world is unique and limited in duration.

Once you are able to come to terms with this simple collaborative situation, you may begin to experience a bit of the wonderment that is so often blamed on the Muse.

But this isn’t an article about how-to write poems. This is a commentary on inspiration.

Inspiration, wonderment, being human are all very much intertwined and poetry is one very prevalent ornament of our existence here as a species on this planet. It is a testament to our collective ability to notice and manipulate our surroundings.

Being in tune to our surroundings is the key. Finding the poetic turns of phrase, light, and coincidence in your every day experience is the basis for all poetry. And like anything, the more you do it, the more you do it.

Poetry is habit forming. First you begin to notice things, then you want to apply words to those things (as a note or a journal entry) but the words aren’t quite right. You look in your thesaurus but those words aren’t right either, at least not the way they’re put together, so you come up with something on your own, something that says exactly what it is you are reflecting on in that moment.

This is poetry. Wonder on the page, or in your heart. So long as it is being experienced, somewhere, by someone, it will always be.

4 a.m. + robusto con zucchero é poesia

“Because we cherish life, we cherish the poem as a life-sustaining force. Its strength is the strength of an object: a thing made, a thing present in the orders of our perception.”

- Robert Kelly, A Controversy of Poets

When the amalgam of human poetics is ultimately accepted as a viable part of the evolution of our species, and thus honored on a Sunday afternoon with a brass band or twenty-gun salute (that would be ironic), it will be the poets of the time that attempt to bring forth a meaning of poetics with poetry.

There will be poets on the stage, poets in the field, and poets behind the scenes. I wager there will intellectual attempts to classify millennia of breath and language as art, while others will submit a historical discourse about individual poets and ‘schools' that changed the schema before the schema was ready for change.

This is the nature of our art, our Poetics. It is not difficult to see, the repetitive insistence of poetics as it advances culture, the importance of poetry in defining contemporary efficiencies and maladies in society with emotional and abstract forms.

What is difficult to see is the truth of poetry apriori. It is a sensation; something known even while it is tantalizingly out of reach.

In the moment, in the making of the line, in the capture of articles that define a wanton wandering expletive, there are signals of the poet moving forward and leaving his true time behind. Yet, there she remains on the page.

Later when the poem is published, regardless that it has been alive on the page for months and years, the reader experiences the rebirth of the poem. It recurs every time the poem is read - the truth of the poem is revealed.

The effect poetry has on humanity is in the very nature of what makes poetry so important to human culture. They are clues to a sensibility of the poet's surroundings, to the poet's language, to her need for explanation, and the urge of time at her back.

Poetry is a release and a capturing, a dichotomy in language and breath of the ferocious inner-point that is contemporary human experience in nature. It always will be.

That is why we honor it. That is why we repeat its terms when we write poems. We are obliged to. We need to. It has become a part of who ‘we' are as a species, to be creative in the ways we seek to express our selves.

Therefore, if I were to guess how they might honor poetry in the future, it would have to be a world-wide event; an interpretation of the importance of the nature of poetry to the existence and development of human kind. My suggestion:

A plum for everyone in attendance. That is to say delicious, so sweet and so cold .”