ESSAY: ON POETRY
Essay #558
ON POETRY
by Leon Enriquez
Why Poetry?
Prose is functional language — that conveys information, and accumulates knowledge. Prose is often wordy, and comes in chunks that are lumped together to create meaningful ideas. Prose is necessary to enable social communication and interaction: to barter and to trade, and to inform, to educate and to entertain. Prose is direct, even descriptive, and often long-winded and sequential. Prose is a direct conveyor of clarity and reason delivered explicitly. Prose is just prose. Yet, sometimes prose emulates poetry with a certain panache!
Poetry is the odd ball language uttered by people like mystics, bards and poets. Poetry conveys much more than mere description can through word patterns, imagery, allusion and emotion. A poem addresses your emotional self. Poetry speaks directly to your heart and soul — and addresses the human person in you! Poetry started out simply as lyrics and songs that celebrate life.
Poetry impacts the reader quickly through immediacy and brevity. The lines of a poem confront you with an urgency — to draw immediate attention to the message, and captures your interest straightaway. The feeling element draws you into the poem just like a vacuum cleaner, and impacts your emotional psyche with sweeping strokes as you read the verse lines.
A poem originates from the heart and soul of a poet, and enters into your consciousness abruptly. And the poetic consequences create impact and insight or even disdain and discord. Poetry exceeds the limits of language patterns, and plays to your higher aspirations far beyond your material concerns. A poem can inspire the heart and soul to go beyond the edge of reason.
Poetry Moves
Poetry elevates words and distills language with a new zest, and profound focus on feelings and emotions. Words and lines in a poem assume an emotional quotient far exceeding mere description. Poetry is precise and concise, and yet, exceeds mere meaning. Poetry celebrates our collective humanity and confronts the wonder of life. Poetry touches you whereas prose simply tells you.
Poetry is a work of art — and employs native language to a higher calling: to be the voice of the heart and soul. Poetry celebrates human life, and the human spirit. Poetry exults in life’s uncertainty and beauty despite our emotional upheavals and our struggles to find meaning and purpose. Poetry uses your vivid imagination and stirs your emotive response to life encounters.
A poem is literary art — with minimal words woven into patterns of irony and paradox with succinct imagery and hidden allusion — that compels the reader to ask the question: What’s going on? Poetry matches rhyme with reason, cadence with assonance, and allows the heart to embody the voice of the soul.
A poem consorts the art of feel-telling — and goes beyond story telling. There are many possible meanings clustered in a few lines of poetry. The reader will assemble or infer meaning in a poem by a personal validation of what the poem means — in what they think and feel in their psyche, and what the poet is saying. A poem makes you think and feel more deeply beyond the surface meaning.
Poet and Reader
A poem written by a poet is complete in one part, but not finished, metaphorically! The reader of the poem will by reading through the poem finish what the poet started. Yes, a poem functions well when the poet writes, and the reader reads — to finish what the poet started. Thus the poem is an ever-living organism that survives long after the art form was created. This is the magic and the miracle of the poetic experience.
Every time you read the same poem again, you will feel and think differently, or perhaps be open to an alternate perspective of life. Therein lies the beauty and the tenderness of poetry that calls to you. Poetry sings to your soul far beyond the spoken word. Poetry elevates common language to a realm and reach far beyond reason. Words in poetry become glyphs that say much more than each word can.
Poetry is about being human. The pain that brings some pleasure. The pleasure that turns to pain. The rapture and ecstasy as well as the agony and despair of personal frustrations and injuries felt in our mortal existence grounded by constant change. Poetry confronts our gains and losses, blunders and errors, and the contradictions we experience in life. And poetry reconciles understanding with empathy, joy with sorrow, and ultimately, reward and punishment.
Poetry is a direct path to the soul substance that animates our very existence on this good earth. Yes, poetry can bring spiritual insights without being dogmatic. Yet, poetry can be difficult to decipher like a mysterious puzzle! Poetry weaves deeper meaning beyond mere meaning. The poem is the gift that empowers curiosity — and extracts personal involvement in the reader’s psyche — to think more deeply, and enjoy the poetic experience within.
Poetry Celebrates Humanity
Poetry — good or bad — reminds us of what’s it like to be alive for a brief moment in eternity! A poem is a moment of exultation or exploration — shared with words incinerated with emotions and feelings. Poetry celebrates life through good or bad, pleasure or pain, or even joy, trauma and agony!
A poet is a conduit of feel-telling — opposed to an insipid world that seems to discount poetry as non-functional, useless or even unnecessary. The truth is still the truth no matter what the jaded world thinks! Poetry is crucial to our survival as a people imbued with feelings and emotions and self-expression.
A poem is thus an inevitable language construct that keeps us rooted to our spirit-soul self of being human. Poetry will remain well after the poet has left the mortal body and returns to dust. Poetry is timeless, and truly, inevitable. Poetry extends the reach of language far more than prose can ever aspire and achieve. Poetry is truly word patterns that create magic! And that magic resides in you.
Someone said that “poetry is an artistic way of expressing your feelings and thoughts”. The renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci puts it this way: “Painting is poetry that is seen and not heard. Poetry is a painting that is heard but not seen.”
In The Hudson Review, in an article ‘Two Poet-Critics’, the writer David Mason wrote: “Here’s a thought: literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate.” Or as TS Eliot says: “that a poet’s criticism exists to elucidate the poet’s own taste and ambitions.”
Leon A Enriquez
06 June 2024
Singapore
(Note: Founded in 1948, The Hudson Review is a quarterly magazine of literature and the arts published in New York City; and has no university affiliation, and is not committed to any narrow academic aim or to any particular political perspective.)
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