Poetry and its Ghosts

Here’s a question for you. Answer it honestly.

Have you ever encountered a poem in your Instagram feed, or received a collection of poems you didn't ask for as a Christmas gift, or gotten lost in a very large bookshop with no way out except through the poetry section... and upon glancing down at the horrifying shape of stanzas on a page, felt the panicked tendrils of Rational Thought take hold over your body with the question… what does it mean?

 If you have, then this story is for you.

1. Brain Seeking Body for Poetic Experience

Back in the early days of my philosophy degree, I was led like Dorothy down the yellow brick road to believe that my body was just a poorly designed vehicle for my thinking brain to travel in.

Everything I encountered at university seemed to support this conclusion. Looking around, I saw students with their heads buried in books, spines arched over and hardened like shells, and dishevelled department heads who'd managed to survive till their forties, fifties, and sixties having never heard of a comb or a change of outfit or a drink besides black coffee or Lucozade.

Back in the early days of my philosophy degree, I was led like Dorothy down the yellow brick road to believe that my body was just a poorly designed vehicle for my thinking brain to travel in.

 In those first few years, I spent an all-time record studying for so many hours that I would lose all concept of ever even having had a body, while my brain was doing the mental gymnastics required to follow convoluted arguments against the existence of a Soul, or God, or Human Nature or the Self. Everything was suspect besides The Single Certainty of Rational Thought, Our Philosophical Overlord.

After several months of this, as you can imagine, I had finally descended into a vat of misery.

On one particularly dreary occasion, during a brief intermission from my regular-fit-of-existential-crisis, I remember my misty vision clearing to find my hands holding a slim grey Faber & Faber Edition of T.S. Eliot's poem Four Quartets.

I truly do not remember how I came to own this copy, but I am forever grateful that it found me when it did.

The book began with possibly the most incomprehensible lines to ever begin a poem of any kind. They read:

Time present and time past

are both perhaps present in time future,

and time future contained in time past...

Okay, I thought, I’m not following but maybe it will get clearer.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

Every word was an abstraction. Less than eight lines in, I'd already lost track of absolutely every meaningful attempt to understand what was going on and I simply let the words wash over me like a sound bath...

My eyes were glazed over. If it wasn’t for my raised tolerance for jibber jabber in philosophy books, I wouldn’t have managed to keep reading. But – somehow – I did. I heard the words, far off in the distance:

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present...

And then, three pages into this labyrinth of a poem, something alighted in my body! I wasn’t expecting to, but I began to feel something – not in my mind – but in my body... Apparently, this is the feeling one has of having a body. I’d forgotten!

Some essential sensation was waking up with every word that passed completely beyond my critical understanding. Yes, an ache in my neck, a grumble in my stomach, even a tingle in my legs!

I realised all this with a shock that must have felt as revelatory as Dr Frankenstein when his monster showed the first signs of life. My body was alive!

It was more than a thinking thing. It was a living, breathing, feeling thing. And the words of the poem, were just that – words I could hear with my ears and see with my eyes.

I realised all this with a shock that must have felt as revelatory as Dr Frankenstein when his monster showed the first signs of life. My body was alive!

After realising this, I was a goner. Instead of whatever convoluted texts I was meant to be reading of Kant and Hegel and other German Men Who Understood Things, I was playing word games with E.E. Cummings in the evening.

I was having breakfast meditations with Emily Dickinson.

And I was going deep into the woods with Mary Oliver.

 It was a full-blown love affair with the poets who told me and taught me:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles in the desert repenting.

you only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

2. The Ghost in the Poetry Machine Comes Back to Haunt Me

Cut to several years later – I’m sitting in my room having a perfectly boring night.

I’m a poet and boredom is an essential part of the writing process so I’m basking in the many shades of beige that surround me, the impossibility of naming them anything at all remotely interesting, and generally letting my mind wander, when I get a call from my sister – in a panic!

A few minutes later, I get a response.

My sister says thank you, but I don’t understand these poems.

My heart falls.

She asks me with a shaky voice to recommend a few poems to her on the topic of mental illness for an assignment due tomorrow. I turn to my bookcase.

Sylvia Plath immediately comes to mind, Tulips of course. I snap a pic of the poem. I flip through an anthology of poems edited by Ella Risbridger. I find a poem called Pensive Reflection by Nisha Ramayya, skim it, and think it has potential. I send it her way as well.

A few minutes later, I get a response.

My sister says thank you, but I don’t understand these poems.

My heart falls. I try to get the message across: "There's nothing to understand. Just feel. Just experience. Listen and enjoy the words ringing, the bells tolling, the rhythms moving in your body!”

But I can tell she’s overwhelmed; she feels stupid reading these words that seem big and serious and entirely unfamiliar. And she is not alone.

In this moment, as in every moment I’ve experienced since the beginning of my Love Affair when someone has asked me to explain a poem to them, I remember - sullenly – the truth about poetry and its ghosts.

Although it is my experience that poetry is something totally and irreversibly absurd and joyful... Comical in its pretences. Beautiful in its impossibility to fully grasp with Reason— a vengeful spirit has haunted poetry for many centuries now… people have believed in it generation after generation, and the more people believe it, the bigger and louder and more damaging it becomes.

The ghost that's been haunting poetry’s reputation and burdening us poets with demands for explanation all this time is this: that poetry is (and always has been) a very serious matter.This is simply NOT true.

The fact is most poetry began as song. Just as there are countless songs I listen to and miss layers of their complexity, of their melodies and their deeper meanings no matter how many times I encounter them, there are just as many poems I read with most of their layers lost on me. But that doesn't take away from their beauty. Or the enjoyment of listening.

Words in poems are just like notes arranged in a melody, or tiles in an elaborate mosaic – beautiful to witness – but seen and heard differently at different times of day, as the light and air changes throughout the seasons.

And wouldn't it be ridiculous to hear a song and then throw my listening device across the room, shouting: I didn't understand it! Explain that song to me.

Well it’s the same way with poetry. There’s no one way of experiencing a poem. Certainly not a right way. So, why should we be intimidated?

But regardless of Shoulds or Woulds, if you Are, like my sister was, Intimidated with a capital I, or Overwhelmed with a capital O by the obscurity of poetry, its opaqueness, its muddy meanings, or complicated seemings, and you think you will never understand it…

let me let you in on a little secret: no one fully understands a poem! Not even poets.

3. Some Practical Tips for Dimension-Hopping

Okay, so that’s more-or-less the story I wanted to tell. But I can’t in good conscience leave you without some practical tips on how to get from a place of intimidation to a place of play with poetry, which to the untrained eye can look a lot like hopping between two very different dimensions of reality.

But it’s really not that complicated, so let me do my best to guide you through this.

The next time you find yourself looking at a poem, in any context, and feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed, or even stupid, because you’re asking yourself The Question That Cannot Be Answered: What does this poem mean?

Consider the following:

There is no wrong way to read a poem. Especially if – at first – you forget everything you were ever taught about poetry in school . And I mean, absolutely everything.

Like the idea that poems have to rhyme, or that the difference between a metaphor and a simile really matters. Or all that stuff about meter and syllables. Put it all out of your mind and just take a really deep breath.

There is no wrong way to read a poem. Especially if – at first – you forget everything you were ever taught about poetry in school. And I mean, absolutely everything.

No matter what the philosophers want you to believe, you do in fact have a body that exists and feels and hears and sees. So, look, and listen, and feel, and breathe!

Second - recall that earlier point about how poems are not always meant to be understood? Yes. What a relief!

All this means is that you can decide to read the poem attentively or you can skim it for a word you like and then just look deeply and singularly at that one word the whole time.

You can read it out-loud, or in your head, or in an accent that isn't yours, but you imagine to be the poem's own voice. (I imagine the opening of Four Quartets that I quoted earlier read in a very nasally wanna-be-posh-English accent, for example).

And you can feel the way the words roll off your tongue, or get stuck in your throat, or leave you wanting more… You can savour every word in its most absurd incomprehensible form.

Third - not every poem will be for you. That’s totally normal! But, when you do find a poem you like, keep it around for a while.

not every poem will be for you. That’s totally normal! SO, when you DO find a poem you like, keep it around for a while.

Read it slower, faster, up-side down, tomorrow! Pack it in your picnic basket and bring it to the forest, or the lake, or the shower.

Or bring it out with you on a really late night just about anywhere and pull it out to observe what it looks like in this light.

Make it feel special, kind of like it did for you when you first read it.

And lastly, whatever poem you're reading, if you get lost on the way… that's okay. I've been there too.

Sometimes getting lost is part of the journey. Stop reading, if you like, or start again.

Pick up a pen and write down your thoughts on this marvellous detour. Stare into the distance and ponder existence.

There is actually no rule book to any of this and if there is, we should set it on fire!

The point is the pleasure of it. And pleasure exists in the body. So, follow your body’s instincts. Trust its interpretation, take its advice.

Go eat a bowl of ice cream, or fried rice.

The poem will still be there when you get back, and it doesn’t care whether or not you read it correctly, or if you read it at all.

The stakes are not that high. But for my own sake, I want you to experience what it’s like to love a poem. To let it into your bones. To hear its voice like it was your own soul.

The stakes are not that high. So, give it a try.

So, give it a try. And - for the love of words - let me know how it goes…

Until next week,

Philosophy-deserter turned Poet-mythbuster.

*

POEMS Mentioned Above

• T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

• Mary Oliver's Wild Geese

• Sylvia Plath's Tulips

• Nisha Ramayya's Pensive Reflection

  Further READING for Enthusiasts

• Set me on Fire: a poem for every feeling is the poetry anthology edited by Ella Risbridger that contains Nisha Ramayya’s Pensive Reflection.

Two of my personal favourite poetry collections besides the ones mentioned in the essay are:

• Safia El-Hillo's The January Children

• Nina Mingya Powles' Magnolia

My all time favourite book on poetry and form is:

• Glynn Maxwell's On Poetry