Poetry keeps leading me back to spirituality
Sitting at a roadside smoothie shack in Cabo, I looked at the ceiling and started a poem with these three lines:
Three fan blades
Spin slow enough
That I can see them
But I wasn’t feeling inspired to continue the poem. Instead, I wrote this critique of the one stanza I’d written:
I’m only describing
This is what my editor was talking about
There’s got to be a deeper meaning
In order for it to be a good poem
In order for anyone to care
I pushed back and said
If it is what it is then that’s it
It just is what it is and there’s nothing more
But maybe that’s why it’s not good poetry
We want to feel like it means something
And good art allows us to feel that way
So if a poem is just about what is
And it doesn’t make it mean something
The poem might be more accurate
But good art isn’t about being accurate
And this is where I feel that art and my spirituality diverge
I see it for what it is
But then I don’t make it mean something
The first part is spirituality
And I fail to get to the art of the second part
Here is the original conversation with my editor …
She made this comment on one of my poems:
“A moment in time is beautiful because of what it can tell us, not just because it happens to happen.”
I wrote back to her:
"I believe that things are beautiful just because they happen."
She responded:
"My brother is that way, as far as things being beautiful because they happen. It’s part of his faith as a rabbi—to see and take note of the small things in life is a mitzvah, a religious moment owed to his God. I totally understand that view ... If it’s beautiful because it Is, show us what it Is, give us the grains of dirt and sunstreaks that make it itself."
Separately, I wrote this recently in my personal journal:
"Writing is how I trick myself into believing that things make sense."
I'm pasting all the context here in an attempt to get at what I still haven't said with all this.
It is what it is
It is what it is—this is a spiritual lesson I've learned.
When I want to write, I open my senses to what is. I see the fan blades. I hear the blender blending frozen fruit. I feel the wind from the cars driving by on the back of my neck. I taste the mango in the smoothie. I smell the sea air.
But it seems that just describing what is does not make for a good poem.
The musicality of poetry
Perhaps this is unique to my own poetry because I write free verse and have no command of meter. The basic elements of poetry are meter, rhyme, scheme, verse, and stanza. I employ verse always (otherwise there would be little else to identify my poetry as poetry) and stanza sometimes (except for when I make a poem one long stanza without breaks). I rarely rhyme (although I do alliterate often) and, as already mentioned, I have no ability to employ meter, other than by using a syllabic dictionary and constantly looking back and forth between the scheme and the poem.
If I could employ well the other elements of poetry, then perhaps I could simply describe what is and it would still be a good poem, at least because of the musicality that naturally arises from meter, rhyme, and scheme.
My poetry relies on the ideas themselves inducing awe
Without those other musical elements, my poetry relies heavily on the ideas being interesting, the thoughts being previously unthought of, the last line packing a punch or unveiling a surprise, making mundanities marvelous, tricking you into believing it all makes sense or means something (which it might, I don't know).
And so when I write about the fan blades and nothing more that's not enough. I have to say something about how the fan blades spinning slowly means something, e.g., anthropomorphize the blades so that they are human arms, compare the slow spin to the lazy air of vacationing.
Inspiration from William Carlos Williams
I am trying to remember something that William Carlos Williams said. I think it was William Carlos Williams.
He said something like, I try to get at the thoughts. Remove everything else. Get to the heart of it. Gosh, I can't remember.
I've searched online and it's clear from these other quotes from Williams that he understands what I'm trying to say here, but I can't find the one quote I'm thinking of.
Instead, I'll paste two of his poems that evoke the general sense of it:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the iceboxand which
you were probably
saving
for breakfastForgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
— William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens— William Carlos Williams
As I continue reading about Williams, I am feeling a kinship with him. Here are some of his quotes that resonate with me:
"No ideas but in things"
— William Carlos Williams, Paterson
“Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.”
— William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
“You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.”
― William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet
Lost in translation
Another reason why a poem that just describes what is doesn't make for a good poem might be because so much is lost in translation from the poet to the words to the reader.
The poet has an experience that is seemingly worthy of being made into a poem, then the poet must attempt to translate the real-life, complex, sensory experience, as it was for him, into words, such that a reader can understand the experience almost to the extent of reliving it.
I am now realizing two things.
First, a poet does not make poems about just any experience. A poet makes poems about experiences that are interesting, impressive, awe-inspiring, emotion-inducing.
Second, the poet does not need to translate every single aspect of the experience in order to deliver the interestingness, the impressiveness, the awe, the emotion to the reader; the poet just needs to translate the specific parts of the experience that gave rise to these sensations in him in the first place.
Not every aspect of the experience is essential. When you look at your lover and your heart stirs, the birds flying overhead are not the essential parts of your experience that are stirring your heart. It's the facial expression of your lover, the corners of her mouth creasing into a slight smile. When you close your eyes and feel the beat of the music in your chest at a nightclub and you feel weightless, the color of the shirt that the guy next to you is wearing is not an essential part of your experience that is causing you to feel weightless. It's the sense that the music has somehow gotten inside of you, replaced the beat of your own heart.
It's even detrimental to the poem if you include aspects of the experience that are not essential to giving rise to the sensation of interest, impression, awe, emotion that encouraged you to write the poem in the first place. These other aspects water down the essence of the poem, distract the reader.
Write about only the specific parts of the experience that are essential to inducing the awe
And so I think I've in some ways solved the original problem that was perplexing me. When you write an experience into a poem, you're not just describing all the aspects of the experience.
You're writing the specific experience for a reason. Why? Because it is interesting, impressive, awe-inspiring, emotion-inducing. How? What aspects of the experience are giving rise to the interest, the awe? Those are the parts of the experience you need to write. And you need to write them in such a way that reading the words gives rise to the interest, the awe in the reader.
I think Hemingway talks about this too. He has this quote about how you have to write the exact moment that you feel it as marvelous. Again, I can't recall the exact quote. I think he uses the example of fishing. It's the exact moment that you feel the tug on the line. You find the parts of your experience that contribute exactly to the marvelousness of the moment and that's what goes into the poem.
What’s the point of writing?
Now that we've somewhat settled that, a thought I've had before comes up again for me—what's the point of writing? It seems like an extensively laborious process to translate awesome experiences into words.
I've thought about this before and I think I write to feel loved. I want people to read my poems and love them and, by extension, love me. There are other reasons too. It's cathartic. It helps me to pretend that the world makes sense, as I said before.
I'm starting to think the writing is unnecessary. The art is life itself. It happens and you experience it and that's it. Translating it is an additional and unnecessary step that I take because of the selfish reasons I just mentioned. Although, I suppose not writing at all and just enjoying the awesome moments in my life is also selfish.
In any case, I think the real practice is appreciating the art of your first-person point of view. And this is where the spirituality comes in—the awareness, the observing.
My unmet needs are what keep me writing. Otherwise, I think I might just wake up each morning and do whatever is the first thing that pops into my mind. Eckhart Tolle talks about how he spent years sitting on park benches. Life is this incredible movie that plays for each of us 24/7. It's so real. Realer than any role-playing game.
The cutting edge of art
High-definition surround sound movies and virtual reality video games are the cutting edge of art, if you think about it. They allow the artist to create whole worlds of experience for the consumer more accurately than ever before.
But what are we really doing? We're just trying to create another reality. We're getting closer and closer to being able to take someone and move them from this world to another world. But why? What does this world not have? Perhaps the ability to materialize our every fancy instantly.
Art will never be as good as real life
I guess what I'm getting at is that the art seems to be limited. It will never be as good as real life. Living your real life with conscious awareness is where spirituality comes in.
If I had to summarize human evolution into themes, first we were physical (cave people hunting and gathering to survive), then we were mental (obsessed with the fact that we can control our reality with our minds), then we were artistic (we got bored of the physical and the mental and wanted something more), and now I think spiritual is next.
And this doesn't just apply to humans evolving as a species. It applies to each individual lifetime as well.
More writing on similar topics
I’ve written other posts like this and I still haven’t quite put my finger on what I’m getting at. I’ll keep writing and maybe it will become clear with time.
Here are the other similar posts: