Poetics

Real poetry reveals the horrendous and supremely beautiful complexity of human experience.

Real poetry praises existence and illumines the sacredness of life. It is a form of worship and speaks the language not of society but of the Gods.

Poetry is a divine language the poet is in the process of learning. Not mere words, it is something that comes and goes in words. For such a poet the tongue is holy. Is that why many ancient Gods—Balinese Rangda, Indian Kali, Aztec Sun God—are depicted with enormous lengthy tongues protruding?

Poetry is an extraordinary form of communication, the most condensed transmission of information there is. In the end it is poetry that writes the real and lasting human document. A real poet is a seer who speaks beyond time, soul to soul, a priestess who brings us into direct contact with ultimate reality. There is an old Hindu proverb which states, “The poet can reach where the sun cannot.” Real poetry is revelation, it is spiritual practice. It attempts to bring everything into ecstatic acceptance. In poetry we experience the very soul of the poet, and that soul’s love for what is being made is what makes art great.

Carlyle once said, “Song seems somehow the very central essence of us.” Of poetry
Thoreau said, it is “the very breath of all friendliness.” Wallace Stevens called poetry “the joy of language.” Shelley saw it as “a moment’s monument”; Eliot as “a concentration...of a very great number of experiences”; Erica Jong as “the inner life of a culture.” A Tibetan Lama described art as “the harmonious coalescence of all learning.” “A poet will accidentally define his time simply by reacting honestly and to the full extent of his sensibilities to the states of passion, experience and rumination that fate forces on him, first hand,” said Hart Crane. Beckett aptly proposed that “the heart of an onion or a cauliflower would make a more appropriate tribute to poetic labor than the crown of bay.” For art is whatever is done with ever deepening care in service to the Source. Wandering in the land of the Gods, the poet merely tunes in—the music is always playing.

—excerpted from “Changing Woman” in Goddesses, Goddesses: Essays by Janine Canan