I recently had an interesting conversation with a young poet and good friend that has made me pause and think about some of the philosophical issues regarding poetry, specifically the difficulty of writing it, and the questions one is confronted with when attempting to do so. This entry is somewhat deviating from more formal philosophical inquiry, but I hope it will prove to be interesting intellectual fodder nonetheless. Given my lack of background in this area, I will dive into this topic essay-style with some reflections and questions. (If you have answers or theories, please give them!)
Allow me first to recount my (very recent) experience of writing a poem, one which I assume is rather generic, at least insofar as it seems to make clear to me some of the frustrations many poets have expressed towards language and words. As I began to write, I maintained a dual purpose: (1) to empty, in a therapeutic manner, parts of the whirlpool of emotion I found myself drowning in, and (2) to create a "poem," however one might choose to define that. General wisdom seems to dictate that the process of accomplishing (2) often leads to the successful overcoming of the problematic and/or unwanted emotional state in (1). In reality, I found it difficult to accomplish both (1) and (2) simultaneously. When I channeled my "true," "honest" emotions, my words emerged as trite overstatements that one might find in the lyrics of some tacky power ballad. Conversely, when I tried to create an original, coherent, perhaps even beautiful (if I am to admit of my ambition) work of art, the words seemed to gain a life of their own, crafting elaborate shapes and sounds and donning upon me a
Yeatsian mask against my will.
So what, then, is the philosophical importance of this conflict? Well, first of all, what is
honesty in the context of poetry? If you did not conduct extensive research into every word and every possible combination of words, how could you be sure that the given combination is reflective of your true feelings, or emotions? Are words themselves not just fundamentally inadequate as a form of expression? It seems like no medium could be adequate. Even a sophisticated event-recreation machine which mimicked all sensual and emotional information entering the brain within a particular moment is insufficient to capture any such truth. What's perhaps even trickier is the exact nature of
emotional truth and how it is affected by the basic ways in which we view the world in addition to our (untrustworthy) memories. Can such things be defined?
To continue the story of my intellectual journey as a (highly amateur) poet, I found that there was indeed a way in which my two tasks supported each other, though in a somewhat unexpected fashion. As I was writing, I became bored with certain words and substituted them with more exciting ones. For example, the line
"the moment was right" (a very true reflection of the feeling I was trying to convey) became "
the dove's arson alight." The
dove is a symbol of hope, and its
arson is a darker version of
fire, which--since it is
alight--also represents hope, with connotations of passionate longing as well. The latter surely represents a more complex emotional story, but is it
my story? Was the alliteration of "
arson alight" just too aurally pleasing to pass up, or did a tinge of evil
really lurk behind this potential-ridden but regret-filled moment? Is my work
authentic, even relative to me? To what degree was I being
honest, and not just with a potential reader -- but with myself? It seems that modern, mainstream society has tended to hail darker, more emotionally charged poetry as being inherently most honest, but was I
truly being more honest in the revised line or was I perhaps just letting myself fall into the now-Romanticized notion of a dark, brooding poet?
This brings me to another point:
mimesis. Though I generally believe art to imitate life (at least, historically, if not categorically), I think that the increasing pervasiveness of art in our modern world (likely due to technological advances and the rising of a middle class) has generated increasingly widespread exceptions. As Oscar Wilde writes famously in
The Decay of Lying (1889), it is often the case that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." It is interesting to think about how slightly different tastes in aesthetic qualities of either appearance or sound can produce almost
chaotic results in the final form of the poem. Furthermore, if Life is imitating Art, then our own understanding and conception of our past memories, when committed to paper (or, computer screen), is shaped at least to some extent by our (oft-irrational, oft-unpredictable) aesthetic preferences. Though the anti-memetic concept is often frightening because of its connotations of the power of mass marketing and brainwashing, it's fascinating to see it work at an internal level. By writing and by choosing words with which to express ourselves, we make concrete a fleeting thought and we take a chisel to our memories and carve it into the most appealing shape that we can then fit into our precarious identities.
