An overflow of powerful feelings

Quote:

‘One cannot write poetry if one does not feel intensely, hence the correlation between depression and the writing of poetry’

JEAN ANTOINE-DUNNE

I SPENT AN evening last week at an open mike poetry session. That, for those who have not experienced it, means that poets can just turn up, put their names down and read their poems to an audience. If the compere thinks they are too bad or taking up too much time, he or she can send them off. This didn’t happen the other night. But I did end up thinking quite a bit about the repeated statement by most of the poets that poetry comes out of sadness.

As a Caribbean literature specialist that is not really my experience. After all, many of our poets refer us to ideas of heightened celebration and there is a repeated refrain in the fact of communal historic trauma that seems to transcend individual pain. Unless, of course, one thinks that we in the Caribbean still live our experience of trauma caused by enslavement and colonialism.

The act of writing a poem does act as a form of catharsis or release for many who have gone through periods of mental pain and there are indeed many poets, including Robert Lowell, who have been deeply and psychologically wounded. Lowell had bipolar disorder.

But poetry is not simply an out pouring of pain. Though suffering may seem inherently poetic in some sense, given the many stereotypes that we have of the suffering poet or the poet with angst.

Poetry is a craft. No wonder poets have compared it to carpentry. And what annoys me quite specifically is the idea that one can simply let one’s feelings flow and – hallelujah – there is a poem!

Poetry is “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” according to Wordsworth. One cannot write poetry if one does not feel intensely, hence the correlation between depression and the writing of poetry. Poetry is also an externalisation in capsule form of some powerful sense of reality. There is also a strong element of prophecy in great poetry, born of that very intensity. But in order to have that power it must conform to rules of poetry or, with the full knowledge of these rules, set about breaking them for a good reason.

Oral poetry and poets of this tradition have created different mechanisms and techniques over the ages. It is an art transmitted over thousands of years by cultures such as in Africa where the griot wielded power, across Europe where the storyteller was also magician and priest. In Ireland the Seanchai as travelling storytellers could bind both kings and peasants alike. Histories were kept alive and taught through narratives that combined speech and movement and included such techniques as repetition for remembrance and effect.

A poem is the shaping of an image. It creates a specific idea that takes on concrete form in the imagination. The beauty of a poem is that an image is nuanced by the mind that receives it and by its mode of delivery.

There is no doubt that when one hears a poem performed by a master who understands body language, pitch and tone, that the poetic image attains a great power. As oral poetry, it gains its effect by the poet’s use of pauses and crescendo. The poet understands how to use breath and all available means to bring the audience on a journey where expectations are gradually increased, at times thwarted, and then comes the moment of peak which can in fact be a flattened space – a let-down even.

The poet whose work is primarily to be read, as opposed to listened to, has to bring these skills to a different level and capture an audience with the power of words that embrace the enthralment of movement and sound. These words have to be carefully chosen and set in rhythmic lines that will allow meaning to be clear, complex, yet concise.

Good journalism is an excellent apprenticeship to writing poetry, given that one must use a set number of words without losing any of the desired meaning or effect. It is the reason that many poets write for newspapers and continue to do so, even when it seems unrewarding and pointless. Poetry is about concision and condensation of meaning and affective channelling of the idea and the image that is being crafted.

Open mike poetry allows a combination of rhythm of words and structure and performance and this kind of poetry comes closest to our calypso, which is a form of poetry without the angst.

Words are chosen for maximum effect and allow meanings to collide. One example is when two images co-exist and sometimes clash with hilarious impact. The true master of double entendre and word play is the calypsonian. Think about Man for Kim (Shorty), Congo Man (Sparrow), or Bed Bug by the Mighty Spoiler. So, we are admonished to “listen carefully.”

Poetry suggests the capacity to create endlessly out of lived experience and to do so because we have learnt how to feel. But more so because that experience has gone through the rigour of being looked at and, as TS Eliot might say, has imposed an objectivity in the looking.