[Newspoetry] National Poetry (Awareness) Month

[emerick at chorus.net]

From: <emerick at chorus.net>
Date: 2004/04/19 Mon AM 10:02:02 CDT
To: NewsPoetry at chorus.net
Subject: National Poetry (Awareness) Month

Posted in the New York Times Reader Forum, for discussing Nicholas Opinions.  I borrow the question, to beg it by implication of "What is NewsPoetry."  I said so, so much.

don.emerick - 10:10 AM ET April 19, 2004 (#11445 of 11445)
What Nick's fantasy might mean.

Interpreting fantasies is such an important aspect of being able to live well with others that I am surprised that it is not taught in all the schools -- as such.
 
Instead, in the very area where such teaching might be done, in the subject of poetry itself, we have developed the poor intellectual practice, in recent decades for following prey to the traps of semanticism. I myself have to work hard to resist the sirens of meaning, the dogmas insisting that every expression be examined for meaning, and that expressions lacking plain and useful meanings be ignored.

This thought came to me when I read words much to the same above effect in a Capitol Times op-ed piece last Friday.
 
But, as the article in question was about poetry, it was probably missed, in reading, even by many who think that they fancy to read literature. Poetry is, at one and the same time, not literature -- which I understand to be "stories, long and short -- or "... long, longer, and longest", perhaps, if we wish to add some seemingly quantitative character to the matter.

Poetry can be ground up, like the stuff for a sausage, looking for its meat, its meaning, its methods. Dead Poets' Society shows us such a demeaning world.

Nick's fantasy, we are sure, means something -- at least to him. We have all been taught that there could be Sciences of Psychology, just as our forefathers were taught that the Interpretation of Dreams was a gift from God. Joseph, they said, could interpret dreams. And, Daniel, did too.
 
What happens in dreams is symbolic, but what else could it be? It could not be real, but if it were wholly alien, it would not be able to touch and concern us, later, after we waken, or even cause us to wake, perhaps.
 
A dream is, thus, by such definition, no longer merely a poem, an expression of emotions that is well constructed, terse as a physical law, or a mathematical formula, compact as only beauty can be, in all the essentials, and only being essential.
 
A dream, unpoetically, states a structure of relationships: symbolic and real. For instance, in a dream, some say that every element that the dreamer perceives as more or less real is more or less mere decoration. We can never perceive -- according to the laws of our senses -- anything other than what is real. The symbolic is intuitive, in our nature, because it does not lie out there in our nature.

As McCullough opined, in What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain, there is a blind spot in the eye (in both eyes, as it happens -- which is all eyes). The eye does not in fact see everything that presents itself to the eye. Perhaps, intuition is just like that, a stitch over the gaps in views. And, intutition, having seen something, symbolic, perhaps, may be unable to return to any blissful, status quo ante. Once another Escher drawing is seen, one can't go home again, back to the naive view, that saw only one figure, and nothing in the background but background.

I am sure Nick's fantasy of what a Fantastic George might have done means something. But, it doesn't have to mean a thing, either. He could be treating us. He could be saying this dream, while speaking of a real past, is more about the quality you might desire in a real president, even if such a President is impossible to get.

The Psyche need not limit itself when its nature is unbound -- if here I speak in the language of orthodoxy's oxymoronicism, of self-contradiction opposing other-contradictions -=- and choose to stop speaking.