04 March 2014

Legend.

Homer, Trappers Resting, 1874


The poet who embarks on the creation of a poem (as I know by experience) begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests.  Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart.  To reassure himself – and it is well that he do so – he drinks a glass of clear water and inscribes black flourishes with his pen point.  I say black because -- I say this in the strictest confidence – I never use colored inks.  Then the poet is off on the chase. Delicate breezes chill the lenses of his eyes.  The moon, curved like a horn of soft metal, calls in the silence of the topmost branches.  White stages appear in the clearing between the tree trunks. Absolute night withdraws in a curtain of whispers.  Water flickers in the reeds, quiet and deep … It is time to depart.  It is the moment of risk for the poet.  He must take out his map of the terrain which he will move and remain calm in the presence of the thousand splendors and the thousand hideous masks of the splendid that pass before his eyes.  He must stop up his ears like Ulysses before the Sirens and discharge all his arrows at living metaphors, avoiding all that is florid and false in their wake. The moment is hazardous if the poet at this point surrenders; should he do so, the poem would never emerge.  The poet must press on to the hunt, single-minded and serene, in virtual camouflage.  He must stand firm in the presence of illusions and keep wary lookout for the quivering flesh of reality that accords with the shadowy map of the poem that he carries.  At times, he will cry out loudly in the poem’s solitude, to rout the evil spirits – facile ones who would betray us to popular adulation without order or beauty or aesthetic understanding … It was Paul Valéry, the great French poet, who held that the state of inspiration is not the most advantageous one for the writing of poetry.  As I believe in heaven-sent inspiration, I believe that Valéry is on the right track.  The inspired state is a state of self-withdrawl, and not of creative dynamism.  Conceptual vision must be calmed before it can be clarified.  I cannot believe that any great artist works in a fever.  Even mystics return to their tasks when the ineffable dove of the Holy Ghost departs from their cells and is lost in the clouds.  One returns from the inspired state as one returns from a foreign country.  The poem is the legend of the journey. Inspiration finishes the image, but not the investiture. To clothe it, it is necessary to weigh the quality and sonority of each word, coolly, and without dangerous afflatus.

Federico García Lorca, from Jim Harrison's "A Natural History of Some Poems"

Thank You, Poetessa.

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