Just want to say Hi to Everyone:
I am busy selling my home in order to move so not a lot of time to read and comment.
Just thought I would share an article I wrote a few years back on how important poets are to society. Most times we feel neglected and forgotten about by society.
I love and appreciate you all.
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I did not begin writing poetry until I reached the age of 48 years old (aside from a poem in high school about a lion)
I have always had a deep curiosity and wonder for nature, science, philosophy, psychology and the study of consciousness itself.
My quest for knowledge always has the big questions lurking in the background. ......the origin of mankind and the question of death, or an after-life. I also ponder about the existence of good and evil, creative acts, truth and morality and whether the soul exists. Are there links between these concepts?. I am constantly pursuing ideas and trying to find these possible links.
Often, I am surprised when a poem emerges complete whereas, when I began to write the poem (with no real outcome in mind) it is as if by an algebraic leap I reach a conclusion that had not occurred to me at the start. It is as if the thoughts had been "enfolded each with in the other".
There seems to be a lot of violence in society now, an erosion of human values and although there must be a complex chain of events that causes this, I wonder if it is due to the trend of early Moderns as they embraced the notion that the arts as an especially potent human language should use and explore the darker side of the human condition in order to "shock" human consciousness from its complacent, ignorant acceptance of "middle class virtue."
I think this rejection of traditional values without something to replace them, has had an impact on society in general particularly in the rise of crime, drug addiction and violence and total lack of consideration for others. With the increase in materialism and the decline of spiritualism, society seems to have lost the ability to interact through the medium of language and vocabulary. Poetry is considered useless and is ignored by the majority. Beauty has become superficial and man has distanced himself from the wonders inherent in Nature.
The breakdown could certainly be linked to a failure in the education system as well as the breakdown of family units in their pursuit of material things over family values. I guess I am getting off track here but there are so many things that interlink and in trying to find my own reasons for writing poetry not just the act of writing but the purpose my writings could achieve,
I have been trying to link the essence of conjuring up a world with all of these thoughts and articles that hold answers for me and my arguments.
I read an article recently that asked: “Is Science Killing the Soul?" and I knew inside myself that the answer was no. There are many references to poetry and language and I felt validated when I read the statement.. ".... far from killing the soul, science may prove to be its greatest awakener. I especially concurred with what Carl Sagan wrote, shortly before he died,
"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought? The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. "The intention of the artist is the same as the scientist. To find unity in variety. In “Science and Human Value’s,” Bronowski, argues that the Poet and the Physicist have much more in common than we allow ourselves to believe. He explores the theme that science is as integral a part of the culture of our age as are the arts. He states that all science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature- or more exactly in the variety of our experience.
from an interview in American Scholar
``Criticism of science that I hear comes from people who have really made no attempt to grapple with it. So I think of [sic] little of it as I think of Jeremy Bentham's disdain for poetry, since I know that, though he was a great man, he did not understand what poetry is about. If a man criticizes science, and it turns out that he does not know a quantum from a quantifier, I am bound to say, `When your guru has taught you how to solve linear differential equations, I will listen to you.' I am sorry if that sounds high-handed. But man did not get where he is by cutting out the hard intellectual work, and drawing his judgments from the pit of his stomach.''
__J. Bronowski,
I repeat this as I have experienced this in my everyday practice of finding metaphors in rocks that I pick up because they are perfect in a geometric shape, or situations that present in a metaphoric way in my imagination. Our engagement with language and experience becomes an evolution as a poet experiences the act of writing. Brownoswki more accurately sums up what this means in his statement, "............the sentences that we exchange contain words: words which either stand for objects in the outside world or for actions. This analysis of the outside world is bound up with human language. It is closely related to the visual imagination in human beings, and by its means we dominate and conjure the external world."
Wordsworth in writing about the relation of science to poetry states, " Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge: it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all Science........Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge- it is as immortal as the heart of man."
Herbert Spencer writes, "Let us not overlook the further fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music and poetry, but that science is itself poetic......The truth is that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits are blind to most of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Eliot speaks of the metapysical poets, like Donne, Herbert and Vaughan as having intellect 'immediately at the tips of the senses':
C Day Lewis adds :..." their poetry(metaphysical poets) at its best gives the effect of having been composed by a kind of simultaneous operation of the senses and the intellect, as though at one and the same time they had become aware of the emotional quality of an experience and its logical implications. Whether or not their power was the result of a peculiar psychological conformation common to these writers, it was soon abandoned and the secret of it now appears to be lost."
Gestalt balked at the process of breaking down the experience, which should be studied whole, an organized total entity, not a sum of parts. The moment of perception is a complex but unified crucible the parts can’t find their owner once separated and the separation inherently removes the truth from the study. Reality must be seen as complete, a total configuration.
I will let Auden wrap up this discussion for me:
· W.H. Auden, Preface to Owen Barfield's History of English Words: "Many who write about 'linguistics' go astray, because they overlook the fundamental fact that we use words for two quite different purposes; as a code of communication whereby, as individual members of the human race, we can request and supply information necessary to life, and as Speech in the true sense... Though no human utterance is either a pure code statement or a pure personal act, the difference is obvious when we compare a phrase book for tourists travelling abroad- to a poem... A poet, one might say, is someone who tries to give an experience its Proper Name, and it is a characteristic of Proper Names that they cannot be translated, only transliterated. Furthermore, since poetry is a gratuitous act, in it, as Valéry observed, "everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well. Whereas most code statements can be verifiable or disprovable, most personal utterances are neither... In human language, personal speech is its primary function, to which its use as code is subordinate. If this were not so, then... we should only have one language. Linguistic analysts... seem to believe that by a process of 'demythologizing' and disinfecting, it should be possible to create a language in which, as in algrbra, meanings would be unequivocal and misunderstandings impossible. But human language is mythological and metaphorical in nature... We can only cope with language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous. It will always be possible to use language as... Black Magic. How can the man-in-the street be expected to resist the black magic of propagandists, commercial and political? Formerly philology could remain a study for specialists. Today it must be made required reading in all schools.”
In conclusion I concur, a poet does conjure up a world because there is a kind of magic in language. Socrates wrote a Hypothesis on it. "There is emotional, mythological and intellectual content in our words."
Are the majority of us losing that knowledge?
Suzanne Delaney