"Petals

on a Wet, Black Bough" -- Pound

Last week I composed the following post which quoted a bit from William Carlos Williams:

“It is difficult

to get the News from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.”

This led me to spend some time thinking about just what we get from poems, and I have a few ideas:

• Psychedelic, associative consciousness

• Symbolic modes of thought

• Intimate interaction with the mind of a stranger

• Aesthetic delight from the images, soundplay, syntax, grammar, and other techniques

• The spiritual nourishment of internalizing an Other voice

• A sense of Myth

• Metaphor — the ability to speak of one thing in terms of the other, merging different aspects of reality into a single consciousness

Conjoining all of these traits (and there are others, I’m sure — my copy of the Princeton Encyclopedia is bursting with elements of poetry) is the Main Event: Meaning.

Meaning is something we get from our interactions with one another, our shared values and experiences, our religions and philosophies, our private reflections and yes, our literature.

And there are different kinds of Meaning.

There is semantic meaning, with which we’re all familiar. We read a text and know that its statements mean X.

This type of meaning is enriched by inflection and innuendo in poetry, taking on connotations, associations, symbolic suggestions, ironic insinuation, social assumptions, morals, and the like.

But there is another greater kind of Meaning that is the topic of John Vervaeke’s work on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which is insinuated in the Williams quote.

This is the type of Meaning which gives us purpose, function, participation, and a sense of home within the world.

This kind of Meaning is the one which is threatened when all tradition is stripped away, and we are left trying to grasp at the cosmos for a sense that our experience matters, that we’re not mere accidents who might as well be dead, that our lives offer some small sense of significance in this vast universe.

This type of Meaning allows us to be all-too-aware of our hubris and folly, beckons us to be kind and beneficent to other people, gives color to our perceptions, and allows us to be Present in the moment in a fulfilling way.

It doesn’t require that we have neatly-tied-up philosophies, theories of everything, or that we adhere to religious credos — simply that we take and eat from the Tree of Life as well as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

You might think, yeah, but I hate poetry. Fair enough. As Williams refrains in his quote, I’m not arguing that you need to read literary verse to get at this Meaning, only that said artistic form is one possibility which might be of help.

When I read a good poem, I have an instantaneous shift in perspective, I begin to experience solitary conditions as being strangely connected to a larger field of potential, and the act of Being still and reading becomes participant in a dialogue with a voice outside of myself.

And Poetry, incidentally, isn’t present only in Literature, but also in Cinema, dance, painting, sculpture, and other arts.

There is another facet to poetry that I have not yet listed here, and that is Spiritus. Hélas, that shall have to await another post.

Stay Tuned.

Aboundingly,

Aaron