THE INNER POET
From my teens to my thirties I was a secret poet, writing in free (very free) verse. Poetry was the voice that captured dreams, and I was a regular, vivid dreamer with themes (memes one would call them today) that recurred and a few still do. What was the point? Why would I recall and reconstruct dreams and assemble them in words that spun their way out of my fingertips and tapped into a keyboard? I never stopped to question that. The images floated out at me and words wrapped around them. The emotional flavor, the generated affect states, rode along like counterpoint.
In my brief English lit student career at Uof Chicago I took a course on prosody from Elder Olsen who lived on campus barricaded behind double doors and a predatory canine named Luther. The course did not end well. He ripped my term paper from my hand as the door slammed shut, Luther standing by with a drooling snarl. I turned on my heel and headed to Rosalie’s office, the sweetly gracious premed counselor who aided my course change.
Professor Olsen had rendered formal, institutional prosody inimical to me.
With its own meter base music breaks free of bounds written down and conforms to meter frequently stretched and even disordered. And yet its beat goes on, lyrical and rhythmic.
Language too speaks in rhythm. Its arc carries a music that has tonality and plays to imagistic content and renders multiplex meanings dipped into wells of feeling.
Poets in ancient times banked their lines in formats that served as memory markers. Those symphonic accretions, becoming epic poems, were deeply colored by the beauty of the assembled words, the richness of meaning and sung sounds coupled together. Formal prosody was born out of this necessity to provide recall markers while creating a vast unwritten poetry of song and substance.
Why did I lose my poet voice?
I borrow an explanation from Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry: the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem is the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal experiencee. A poem exists to be recited to / to be read by others—a community. Like music whose existence comes into actuality by being heard, by being listened to.
My loss came from turning away from the poetic community. Not intentionally. Forgetting why, and just forgetting. Science leans into linear and digital data collection and data reading which hangs on the formal on/off. It may provide a great tapestry of revelation that has its own transcendent beauty. And poems can often feed off it.
Once captured by science and then hearing schizophrenics rant in a kind of twist of poetry, I attended to their alignment of words of mixed meaning, while they canted them in voices from speculated experience, seeming to become poets of their despair and their derangement.
But I am left a hater of poetry who still loves poems.
And my poems, abandoned and in comfortable ruin, now rest in a catacomb of drawered files.
Do they beckon?
Do I dare?
