poetics ovenbird I often run into fascinating reflections on the theory of poetry, its structure, form, and function. It’s been a long time since my academic days, but I find myself aching to return to the study of language and literature in a self-directed way. To that end, I thought it would be nice to have a place to put some of the theoretical ideas that appeal to me (and please do feel free to add your own). ************************************ I’ll let Mary Oliver start us off, because she will forever be one of my favourite poets and thinkers. From A Poetry Handbook: ”The reader, as he or she begins to read, quickly enters the rhythmic pattern of a poem. It takes no more than two or three lines for a rhythm, and a feeling of pleasure in that rhythm, to be transferred from the poem to the reader. Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, the sweet grows sweeter. When it becomes reliable, we are in a kind of body-heaven.” Body-heaven. I love that. I love the way it turns the idea of heaven completely inside out. Because the very notion of heaven is generally attached to a separation from the body—only accessible when we are dead and our souls go to some incorporeal place where bliss is eternal. So I love that Mary Oliver situates heaven in the body, in the very physical experience of rhythm as a function of language. Poetry and music, then, are spiritual practices that can give us access to heaven inside ourselves, not abstractly, but concretely, by connecting us to visceral pleasures that mediate the space between mind and soul and body. A poem is not just meaning, but a somatically felt thing—a lilt, a tap, a repetition that is as present as a heartbeat. When we are moved by a poem it has as much to do with how it sounds and feels as what it says and maybe something in us wants to move in concert with that rhythm, maybe something in us leaps up and recognizes the particular pleasure of a primal chant. 260830 ... raze in an interview conducted around the time "the great fires" was published, jack gilbert said, "i really think poetry is urgently important. not as an entertainment. not because it's beautiful and it uses rhymes well. but it's almost ... it's one of the very few things we have to make what's important visible." i know i've quoted that elsewhere. but it felt like it was worth sharing here too. i think there's so much truth in there about the way words allow us to make music from the mess and magic of our deepest selves. 260830 what's it to you? who go blather from