Gregory Stanford Poet Prose

Poetry and its perception - a short essay.

A poem is not a logically coherent snapshot of consciousness; rather, poetry testifies to a breach of established logical conventions, offering a new perspective. This perspective reveals certain unspecified meanings that can only emerge through poetry. A poem should not be read as some sort of autobiographical document. On the contrary, an honest poem challenges the notion of documentary accuracy; it is almost always an imprint of complex reflections on memory, an event or events, and the musings of the subconscious—musings that are not obvious to the author—and this entire ensemble of meanings emerges at a specific moment and is never repeated thereafter. Or rather, the moment appears only to never appear again. There are no copies, poetry asserts; we cannot halt a moment in time to calmly reproduce the very same action in the very same state of consciousness. Most likely, the river seen by Heraclitus would have remained the same without poetry. In constant change, there is neither truth nor falsehood – there is simply a given reality as it reveals itself to the poet’s keen attention. After all, one might well fail to notice any changes at all – indeed, it is probably safer to perceive reality in this way. And there is no error on the part of the observer here. There are no rules. The play of time shifts with every moment spent within oneself and in the outside world, but we are under no rule to detect these changes. And what if some people do not change? – then their objects, too, remain unchanged. The parade of eternal entities is always somewhere nearby, sometimes closer than one might wish. But we are under no obligation to take part in this parade. On the other hand, we owe no debt for missed changes; little depends on us, for we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that we are the masters of our own destinies. Noticing what the so-called ‘others’ fail to notice is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. It is simply a peculiarity of perception that brings comfort to the perceiver. It is rather like zooming in with a built-in camera – would be ridiculous to think that the camera acquires a soul the moment it zooms in on a subject.

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