On poetry and the innocence of the unconditioned mind
I wrote my first poem when I was six or seven, I can’t remember exactly which, it’s so long ago, but I do remember that my Mum has the newspaper clipping somewhere. One of the few things she kept from the mass of creations that children make and which cluttered the attic for a long time, because of my Dad’s desire to hold on, until my Mum won out and made space in the house.
“Little bird in the city”, I believe it was called. Something about a lonely bird flying high across the cityscape, which I can only guess in my childlike imagination wasn’t about Leicestershire where I grew up.
I doubt, from experience that as children we locate ourselves geographically. We live outside and beyond such artificial confines and borders for a blissful and blessed time, the time that precedes the interference of politics and society and culture.
Significantly, gladly, I don’t recall being overly aware or concerned about the place I occupied, in terms of where I was. That all came later, when I was circumstantially compelled to become conscious of my place in the world, or rather, what other people determined it to be, and where other people decided I shouldn’t be or where I didn’t belong.
At that tender age where life was lived in the imagination, in the free and sunny place of the relatively unconditioned mind, I dreamt of birds and flight, of bears and clouds, of make believe friends, who in hindsight, were probably a lot more comforting and reliable than some of the ones I ended up making in the early years of my real life.
It would be wholly true to say that for much of that happy time, to paraphrase Hemmingway, that books and words were the best friends I had.
Although I did have a melancholic side to me, already. Anthropomorphising about this particular bird, the subject of my ditty, being lonely, imagining why a singular bird that I had likely seen glide across the skies above my childhood home was unaccompanied by a flock.
Feel it and form it
Can I call it poetry, when at that age I knew nothing of the form and structure that I later learned when studying English literature? Yes, I’d say firmly yes. Because it was purely about experience and conveying that what I felt, where pure refers to a heartfelt appreciation that isn’t weighed down my intellectual notions and academic restrictions.
And let’s face it, that’s what academia can do, stifle our voice with ideas of right and wrong, of form and structure, of good and bad, as determined by the selected and selective dons we get exposed to and taught by (mostly white men, in my own education; I believe it’s different now, or at least becoming more different, hence better, more diverse, more honest and representative).
That said, academia and education can also be liberating, informative and inspiring. For me it certainly was. Both things are true.
I loved studying, I loved a lot of those words by said men. And I got to love more via the words of writers who I discovered later who broadened by mind even further, thanks to their sense of place and space beyond said borders and whiteness.
Before schooling and university, and the reason I studied what I did (poetry, prose, psychology, philosophy). I was never happier than when sat amongst books, reading, dreaming, playing with words, hearing the sounds of them and feeling the sense of them, the sense of what I could do with them, of what others did with them, of how writers moved me with theirs – which all led me to want to keep being moved, and maybe one day move others with mine.
Back to the bird then, and why nearly forty years later, I feel I can say that my first poem counted, in a move towards saying that all of our efforts count in the sense that they serve a fundamental, primal, humanising purpose of inviting us to feel and attend to life deeply and freely.
Poetry, at heart - and it’s the heart-mind that we’re moving rather than the intellectualising tendencies of the brain - is about paying attention to the world and capturing what it is we sense, taste, hear, touch and see. Not what we think we should believe about all of these things, but what experience really reveals to us.
As one of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets ee cummings says (scroll down to hear me read it in full):
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you
Poetry may well have been my first literary love. My first love full stop. And I still return with gladness to it often, to the space that it allows, to the brevity and the poignancy that a few words, artfully rendered to the page, can do.
Ursula le Guin touches on the purpose and the impact of it well, saying:
"The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out. "
In short, poetry, and the essence of what it invokes, is a feeling of ah, aha, yes, it’s like this, life is beautifully like this, and that, in a few words, is so much more than enough.
What is poetry?
This is something that came up in this week's Reflective Writing Practice & Sharing Circle, where we played with words, and wondered about the merit of our own.
What are your thoughts? And what are your favourite poems? Please share!