An Essay in Three Parts
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1.
Consciousness is trapped, the body’s hostage. We try to tell others what we think, we can talk endlessly, provoke others to feel how we feel—all of it is in vain. Art has the ability to enable others to feel last night’s dream, with its complex texture and its subtlety amid blatancy, its atmospherics. Not the expression of emotion or the conveyance of information, poetry does its work by using language to emphasize similarities rather than differences. It reconciles tensions, makes love out of war. In its deepest intention it is nothing less than telepathy via the word. Long ago it could be magic as well: telekinesis achieved through word-sympathy aided by rhythm (which is a kind of hypnosis), hidden or overt resemblance. The poetic consciousness yearns to make what is outside inside, what is inside outside. It cannot understand why it should be prevented from merging with alien matter or with the thoughts of others. It seeks to bring the world of dream to that of conscious daylight. It seeks wholeness—unity—in heterogeneity. It makes variousness musical rather than chaotic.
2.
Literature… is not the news. It is information, the stuff of the news, become art. Literature is literature because it rewards rereading even when one knows, remembers all the details, facts, remembers the entire plot. Literature remains literature even after the spoiler has tried to spoil it, even after its own historical moment has passed. It can withstand the worst of spoilers, and for that reason may also stand the test of time. One rereads it the way one re-listens to a song, over and over until one feels a little sick. Then still returns to it... It sustains one, like a nutritious food. It refreshes like water, it’s delicious like candy, gives shelter like a house. . . It provides good company like an old friend. One remembers where one was, the smell, the season, everything about the time one first encountered it; it is remembered with pride, treasured like an epiphany, a serendipitous one-night stand one had very long ago, one summer on holiday, far away from home. It helped make one who one is. Yet one is nostalgic for the person one was on that irrecoverable day. Literature’s a holiday, an escape from the old, too-familiar life; other times it’s a home one can freely come back to when the world has become lonely, threatening, unsure. It’s like a dream that deepens, that changes while remaining essentially the same. Literature is a dream more real than real, proof that one’s memory isn’t just fantasy, misremembering: a solid possession one does not own because one is more owned by it.
3.
The pleasure of reading fiction is to find the outside world (what we perceive with our sight and apprehend with other senses) reproduced inside of our minds, as though through a trick of magic. In short, the outside world begins to exist inside of us. But the pleasure of experiencing lyric poetry is to find the interior world (what we experience in our bodies, in our imaginations, in our dreams) come to life outside of us, on the page, in words. This is what people mean when they say that poetry draws our attention to the materiality of language, as opposed to fiction whose language dissolves, becomes transparent. With poetry, words become like a canvas onto which the imagination and the emotions project their contents. The inner contents of our most private being are superimposed upon words themselves; where, when reading fiction, language is sucked into the imagination; it turns into a kind of steam serving as a medium through which illusions and oases appear like realistic hallucinations.
. . .
1.
Consciousness is trapped, the body’s hostage. We try to tell others what we think, we can talk endlessly, provoke others to feel how we feel—all of it is in vain. Art has the ability to enable others to feel last night’s dream, with its complex texture and its subtlety amid blatancy, its atmospherics. Not the expression of emotion or the conveyance of information, poetry does its work by using language to emphasize similarities rather than differences. It reconciles tensions, makes love out of war. In its deepest intention it is nothing less than telepathy via the word. Long ago it could be magic as well: telekinesis achieved through word-sympathy aided by rhythm (which is a kind of hypnosis), hidden or overt resemblance. The poetic consciousness yearns to make what is outside inside, what is inside outside. It cannot understand why it should be prevented from merging with alien matter or with the thoughts of others. It seeks to bring the world of dream to that of conscious daylight. It seeks wholeness—unity—in heterogeneity. It makes variousness musical rather than chaotic.
2.
Literature… is not the news. It is information, the stuff of the news, become art. Literature is literature because it rewards rereading even when one knows, remembers all the details, facts, remembers the entire plot. Literature remains literature even after the spoiler has tried to spoil it, even after its own historical moment has passed. It can withstand the worst of spoilers, and for that reason may also stand the test of time. One rereads it the way one re-listens to a song, over and over until one feels a little sick. Then still returns to it... It sustains one, like a nutritious food. It refreshes like water, it’s delicious like candy, gives shelter like a house. . . It provides good company like an old friend. One remembers where one was, the smell, the season, everything about the time one first encountered it; it is remembered with pride, treasured like an epiphany, a serendipitous one-night stand one had very long ago, one summer on holiday, far away from home. It helped make one who one is. Yet one is nostalgic for the person one was on that irrecoverable day. Literature’s a holiday, an escape from the old, too-familiar life; other times it’s a home one can freely come back to when the world has become lonely, threatening, unsure. It’s like a dream that deepens, that changes while remaining essentially the same. Literature is a dream more real than real, proof that one’s memory isn’t just fantasy, misremembering: a solid possession one does not own because one is more owned by it.
3.
The pleasure of reading fiction is to find the outside world (what we perceive with our sight and apprehend with other senses) reproduced inside of our minds, as though through a trick of magic. In short, the outside world begins to exist inside of us. But the pleasure of experiencing lyric poetry is to find the interior world (what we experience in our bodies, in our imaginations, in our dreams) come to life outside of us, on the page, in words. This is what people mean when they say that poetry draws our attention to the materiality of language, as opposed to fiction whose language dissolves, becomes transparent. With poetry, words become like a canvas onto which the imagination and the emotions project their contents. The inner contents of our most private being are superimposed upon words themselves; where, when reading fiction, language is sucked into the imagination; it turns into a kind of steam serving as a medium through which illusions and oases appear like realistic hallucinations.
. . .
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