On Poetry I

Feeling My Way in the Dark

I’ve been thinking about poetry, ever since I read Dark Mountain: Issue 10 – Uncivilised Poetics last year, and particularly after I read Jay Griffiths’s Tristimania a few months back. As a consequence, I decided that I was not only going to try to write some poems (some of which I have shared here), but that I was also going to write some posts about poetry. This, therefore, is my beginning, my way in to the subject. I hope that, over the next weeks and months, I will gradually be able to say more, though I want to make it clear that this will be a very personal exploration. I’m no expert on poetry. I merely want to find in it what speaks to me—and perhaps to some of you, too.

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The editors of Uncivilised Poetics had this to say:

There’s something dishevelled and unsettling about poetry. In 2016, at a time of escalating global violence and uncertainty, poetry might seem irrelevant. What’s the point of poetry when the streets of Syria are being bombed? What’s the point of poetry when the permafrost is melting? But poetry matters because it offers an alternative reality – it refuses the logical, reductionist, materialist aspects of industrial culture; aslant, it invites us to feel our way in the dark. And most importantly, it matters because it often fails. Poetry often fails to speak universally, but succeeds in trying over and over again to speak. Poetry is a shabby, uncivilised failure that we badly need in these unravelling times; if for no other reason than as a mirror for our human imperfection. (1)

As an ‘alternative reality’, perhaps what poetry can provide is closer to ‘real’ than what civilisation currently offers us. Our world is too skewed in the direction of left-brain, overly rational, intellectual, and, dare I say it, ‘masculine’ thinking, and this means that we do not perceive the world as it truly is, nor how it could be. Thus what we need is to turn our focus towards the right hemisphere of the brain, the more visual, creative and ‘feminine’ side. This, I would argue, is where poetry comes from (and art, visions, dreams and so forth). Though poems are formed from words, they do not emerge wholly from the verbal left side of the brain, but primarily from a more visual, imagistic and feeling place. And though they may then be edited and consciously reworked by the left brain, they still retain their ability to speak to the right side.

This is so very important. I myself am guilty, from time to time, of over-intellectualising, so I recognise the importance of developing my right hemisphere, of being able to think, and, most crucially, to feel, in a more creative and embodied way—beyond civilised or patriarchal paradigms—sometimes even beyond words. I like the idea that poetry can be radical, rebellious and wild, and therefore connect us with those necessary but very underused parts of ourselves. Hence, Uncivilised Poetics caused me to start to think about how poetry can be a revolutionary force, alongside all other creative work that resists destruction.

And then I read Tristimania, Jay Griffiths’s account of a year-long episode of manic depression (bipolar disorder), and what she had to say inspired me further. There is a strong relationship between suffering and poetry (and art, in general), and ‘If there is no doubting the relationship between the ability to suffer and the need to write poetry, so there is also no doubting the way in which poetry eases suffering’. (2) She says:

To heal is to make whole, and when the mind is broken poetry can work towards healing it, uniting it with itself and reconnecting it with the world. Art comprehends us – it is through language that we are understood – and poetry, above all, steps into the heart and saturates it with understanding. Whenever I read poetry which has this kind of knowledge, I know that I am known. I am seen. I am not alone. How to understand a text is a matter of pedagogy. How to be understood by a text is a matter of healing. In the awful loneliness of depression and the bleak, mind-swept realms of madness, poetry comes kind to hand, offering to unpuzzle silence.

When the psyche is ill, the world can seem inchoate and unwordable, but poetry, shaping words, gives form to formlessness; it threads words like beads on a line to lead you up from the underworld. (3)

This made me think of how I could also use the writing of poetry to explore the situation I am in, to express what I am feeling (however incompletely or inchoately), and to find ways to heal.

Poetry as rebellion 

as antidote to 

too much civilisation 

Poetry as healer 

as reconnection 

with self – and world 

This seems like 

a good place to start 

to begin to feel my way 

in the dark 

towards whatever wild words 

want to be written

References:

1. Em Strang, Nick Hunt & Cate Chapman (eds.), Dark Mountain: Issue 10 – Uncivilised Poetics, The Dark Mountain Project, Autumn 2016, p. 1

2. Jay Griffiths, Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression, Penguin, 2016, p. 125

3. Ibid, p. 126