ARS POETICA

1.

A poem is something that can’t otherwise be said addressed to someone who can’t otherwise hear it. By this definition, poetry is deeply impractical and deeply necessary. There aren’t good words for most things we need to express, and lots of the people we need to say them to are dead or otherwise unavailable. Poets tend to need poems to handle subjects that are complex, subtle, nuanced, even painful, embarrassing, shameful, or simply ridiculous if actually uttered aloud. And so we have always needed poetry, as long as there has been language, and perhaps even before. Language began with poetry, with the idea that this means that, a word, a sound, can conjure a thing, with the fact that we often need our mouths to point to what’s beyond the reach of our hands.

So much of life happens inside our heads, where other people can’t see. Language is the fundamental bridge between inner and outer worlds, between people, even neighbors, who are always roadblocked by their skulls. Poetry is how we pay attention to that bridge, how we make sure it doesn’t fall, how we maintain it, fix it when it gets rickety.

As long as people communicate, there will always be poets. But how and why do people begin to be poets, and what do they themselves gain from poetry? The people who gravitate toward poetry, usually as children or teen agers, love words, find a kind of conjuring magic in them, find them as entertaining as toys. But I would wager that most poets, in addition to being word fetishists, finally dedicate themselves to poetry—or find themselves helplessly in its thrall—in order to answer for something deeper and perhaps darker than their passion for words.

Though their art is a refined form of speech, poets know more about silence than they do about sound. They are people who, for any number of reasons, cannot, or at one point could not, speak. Perhaps they have something particular to say, but as often, they are people deeply, desperately in need of speech itself. The philosopher and aphorist E. M. Cioran claims, “One does not write because one has something to say but because one to say something.” Poetry seeks to fill the silence to which most poets have a heightened sensitivity. A certain amount of loneliness—an awareness of the unsayable—is a precondition for poetry, or for much poetry. Which is not to suggest most poetry is sad or lonely, just that it must be aware of the space around it, the silence that defines it. This is why poems look the way they