On Poetic Communication

Sometimes I feel a compressed longing to write poetry. Or rather, a poetic urge rises up in me: something undefinable and ineffable. Like when silence presses around you, forcing you to whisper, and you desperately want to say something but cannot find the words. So you just exhale. And that exhale contains everything that you needed to express, everything inside of you that needed to be infused with meaning. The smallest, most deliberate, yet subconscious act. The frailest of songs.

The theme of my experiences this past month has been communication: the lack of it, the need for it, and the struggle to achieve it. How difficult it is for us to understand our thoughts enough to shape them into words, and to express those words to others in a language that is permeable and lucid! And what dedication and attention is required of the listener! Pure understanding, between the creator and the receiver of words: a near impossibility. It makes language seem feeble, useless, or if not useless, a burden that we are forced to bear. Sometimes I even have trouble communicating with myself, as both the creator and receiver. Internal dialogue gone awry (how comical). Ideas and ideals that used to be firmly imbedded suddenly become shaky, and definitions need to be refined and renewed. Life is interpretable. Or, perhaps – life is interpretation. Just one long poem that we are in the midst of writing, revising, inspiring.

Or perhaps it is music that we are making, performing, improvising: octets, dwindling to sextets, to quintets, quartets, trios, sometimes mere duets (dare I write "mere" duets? Or is this the most intimate of chamber music?). The ebb and flow of daily interactions, people weaving in and out of our melodies. Or those haunting sonatas that you play to the world when the sun dwindles and no one else is listening. Solitude. Still struggling to make the notes be understood in the way that they long to be.

Or perhaps it is just me, in a grasping attempt to come up with as many meaningful metaphors as possible. To fill the void of my insufficient communication.



Addendum: a tribute to Abbie

"Poets, I believe, are more closely in touch with the spirit of grimalkin, the soul of a pussy-cat, than either prose-writers or painters. They should be, because poets are mystics, at least the great poets are mystics, speaking like the oracle or the clairvoyant...The poet knocks at gates which sometimes open wide, disclosing gardens to which entrance is denied to those who stumble to find truth in reason and experience. Faith is needed to comprehend the cat, to understand that one can never understand the cat." -Van Vechten