What Is Poetry?

1.

The Greek meaning of poem just means “made thing.” Poiesis is the activity of forming or shaping something. In Hebrew, there are two words for creation, briah and yetzirah, the former referring to creation ex nihilo and the latter to the creation of something from something else. Poetry corresponds to this second kind of creation; it is the art of revision, gathering, separation. First, God says, “Let there be light.” Next, God separates light from dark. A poem separates itself from the world in which it lives, draws a line on the page. A poem draws attention to the margins where it ends.

2.

For Heidegger, the original meaning of poetry is not making, but revealing. Making is derivative of revealing. To equate a poem with making is already to think the poem in terms of technology. But a poem is that which lets things be, while technology lets things be—used, exploited, leveraged. Poetry and technology are two sides of the same coin, but only poetry lets us realize this, lets us see the poetry in technology (while technology says of the poem, “What is this garbage?”) Is the Brooklyn Bridge poetic? Is O’Hare airport? Is an iPad? SpaceX? Self-driving cars? Can we really divide things between poetic and non-? Are not Steve Jobs and Elon Musk doing for tech what O’Hara and Ashbery did for poems, namely, effacing the boundary between sacred and profane? For the poets, poetry became a casual endeavor, while for the technologists, tech became a religion. Apple Stores look like modernist cathedrals.

3. 

A poem reveals that revelation is always accompanied by hiding. A poem makes us acutely aware of what cannot be known, makes us intimate with the unsayable. The prosaic does not give us such intimacy. It makes us think (erroneously) that mystery doesn’t exist or that we have explained it. In the kettle logic of the anti-poetic, there is nothing to grasp and we have grasped it.

4.

Yehuda Halevi writes:

Where, Lord, will I find you:
your place is high and obscured.
         And where
               won’t I find you:
         your glory fills the world.

Substitute the word poem for Lord and it still works. The poem is at once beyond us and ubiquitous. This is the theme of Ben Lerner’s book, The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner says he loves poetry as an idea even as poems themselves can’t measure up to it. If everything is poetry, nothing is. But when only some things are poems, a poem becomes an idol or a fetish. If God’s glory fills the whole world, it cannot be destroyed. God can go into exile with us. Likewise, poetry can outlive both our enjoyment and dislike of particular poems. Poetry goes into exile with us. Those who destroyed the temple thought they had killed God. They were wrong. At most, they made God homeless. The evisceration of a poem can never spell the evisceration of poetry. Criticism frees poetry to be at home in its wandering.

4.

The recognition that God’s glory is everywhere need not prevent one from distinguishing Sabbath and weekday. Likewise, the realization that everything is poetic need not prevent one from distinguishing between the poetic and the prosaic. Poetry is the paradox. The paradox that the prosaic is poetic even as it denies the paradox.

5.

“Is this a poem or not?” people might ask about all kinds of things. And, usually, relatedly, “Is this a good poem or not?” In the narrow sense, one can answer those questions. But in the broad sense, they are as difficult to answer as their corresponding theological questions. Is God here? How can a good God allow evil? A bad poem raises the problem of theodicy, as does a poem whose aesthetics are brilliant, but whose morality disturbs. Are Eliot and Pound no less poets when writing against Jews? They are—not. That the Egyptian sorcerers could also perform miracles in the names of their gods was no reproof of the One Who Speaks and the World is Created.

6.

How does one become a poet? Lineage. But the modern world is a world of broken lineage. The poet must create a lineage. The poet must be a meta-poet. The poem the poet makes is not the particular poem, but the collaborative trans-generational poem, the renga, on the question, “What is poetry?”

7.

[“This section intentionally left blank.”]—Charles Bernstein