A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And--Ninety-Five

I have been thinking quite a lot about what it means to be a poet.  For me, it tends to be about an intimacy with language as a physical thing, with words as objects.  In our usual interactions with language, we are treating it as a means, as a method for communicating.  The words are not important in and of themselves, but as the vehicles for expression.  When I write poetry, however, the words still communicate, of course, but they are themselves a solid presence, are integral.  An essay or story is not, in some sense, made of words, but made of the elements of those mediums, ideas, plots, characters.  The words act to carry these things to the reader, but are not the primary offering.  This is, of course, a general statement, and is less and less true over time, I think, as writing in other genres beyond poetry begins to take on these qualities (I could write as to my thoughts on the reasons for this, but I will save that for another time).  A quote I heard once, attributed to Hemingway, stated something like "every novel since 1920 is a prose poem."  The point is not about the specific genre, but about a way of thinking and approaching language, and that can be applied to any piece of language, but is, for me at least, most associated with the poetic mode.

The poem does not use language, but is an object made of language.  That distinction is one that I find impossible to truly explain, and is likely only to mean anything to a person who already understands what I am intending to mean.  There is a specificity to the language in a poem that goes beyond the normal considerations, and is not only limited to the dimensions of sound and visual shape.  The feeling of words in the mouth is often an important matter, is an aspect of the pleasure of the language as it is spoken.  Poetry has to be rooted in that kind of visceral knowledge of words, in the same way that a glass artist must understand the silica they are working with.  Indeed, I often think of writing a poem as an act of sculpting, of forming words into a physical thing, both on the page and in the body of the reader.  It seems to me that other poets I have known felt a similar way, but, of course, I am also certain it is not quite the same for any two people who take up this pursuit.