What is poetry? And why has it been around so long? Many have suspected that it was invented as a school subject because you have to take exams on it. But this is not why poetry is or why it is still around. That’s not what it feels like either. When you really feel it, a new part of you happens, or an old part is renewed, with surprise and delight at being what it is.
Where poetry is coming from.
From the beginning, man has known that words and things, words and actions, words and feelings go together and that they can go together in a thousand different ways, according to who is using them. Some ways go shallow and some go deep.
Your connections with other imaginations.
The first thing to understand about poetry is that it comes from outside you, in books or in words, but for it to live, something from within you must come to it, meet it, complete it. Your response with your own mind and body and memory and emotions gives the poem its ability to work its magic; if you give to it, it will give you and give plenty.
When you read, don’t let the poet write down to you; read up to him. Reach for him with your gut out, and the heart and the muscles will come to it, too.
“The things around us-like water, trees, cloud, the sun belongs to us all. How you see them can enhance my way of seeing them…and just the other way around!”
Which sun? Whose stars?
The sun is new every day, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus said. The sun of poetry is new every day, too, because it is seen in different ways by different people who have lived under it, lived with it, responded to it. Their lives are different from yours, but by means of the special spell that poetry brings to the sun, everybody’s sun—yours too, you can come into possession of many suns: as many as men and women have ever been able to imagine. Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of possession of the world
The most beautiful constellation in the winter sky is Orion, which ancient poets thought looked like a hunter, up there, moving across the heaven with his dogs sirus. What is this hunter made out of stars hunting for?