For the Sake of a Single Poem, by Rainer Maria Rilke
… Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else-); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, – and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
19 comments:
I wrote my best poem a long time ago. It’s “Errant,” on the sidebar. I don’t know if I have another one that good in me.
That was before I watched my father die, and sat beside him as he did. I don’t know if I want to write about that. I think some things are beyond even poetry.
You have many experiences now and you're a good story teller. Whether you produce more good poems depends on whether you want to take the time to craft them. Maybe you feel like you've told the stories you want to tell and you're done, but that's a different thing.
I think that all the regulars here have had these experiences by now. We are all safe from writing poems too early in our lives, I suspect. So, if we want, it's a good time for any of us to become poets.
Have we forgotten the experiences, then remembered them? Have they become our blood?
I think there is something to Rilke's idea of getting to the point an experience is forgotten and then remembered. One school of thought is that we should write poems when the experience is fresh and raw, but I suspect the better poem comes after we've had plenty of time to reflect on the experience, forget it for a while, and then recall and integrate it.
I think part of the experience becoming our blood is that it becomes part of how we tell stories. We don't have to tell our own stories; we can put those experiences to use in telling stories about other people, as you have done in your novels. You wrote about other people, but your experiences informed your writing.
And I think the regulars are in the stage of life Rilke talks about. It'd be fun to see what kind of poems everyone would write.
By all means write poetry, if you think you have something to say. I guess I think more along the lines that Willie Nelson mentioned in "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys," which is that the words were of my youth. I know more, now; I have experienced more. Somehow, all the same, I feel like I have less to say. Poetry is an act of hope, and I suppose as you grow older there is less potential to be hopeful about.
It doesn't have to be hope for oneself, of course.
But, I would never encourage anyone to write poetry who wasn't already interested; it's too much work, and everyone already has plenty to do, I suspect.
Except maybe if someone had never written a poem, it's worth writing a few to see how one likes it.
It may well be that I have a lot less hope for anything. I used to think we could change the world; now I don't know if we can change ourselves.
I think of the old Chinese story, which is Chan Buddhist if I remember correctly, that the man who blames his enemies for his problems is far from home; the one who blames himself, much closer. But it is the man who has learned to blame neither his enemies nor himself who is almost home. The world just is what it is. What remains to us is just to be honorable to one another as we can.
Maybe there's a poem in that.
As an artist, I have produced many pieces. All of them depended on the medium necessary to bring the piece from my head out into the real world. Poetry is one such medium, and I used to write pages of poetry when I was younger and lived in my head. A few have even been published. Poetry requires solitude - something that seems to be harder to find as one grows older. Throw in a dash or ten of internet/social media use and it can seem an impossible threshold to obtain. I'm not talking about being alone, but solitude such as that which can be found at Grim's personal waterfall. It is in those spaces where you can let your thoughts ping around in your head, roll them around in your mouth to see if they make sense, and maybe, just maybe, write them down. Poetry is oral beauty, and like any artistic endeavor, takes time and attention to detail. Time. Something that most people find less and less available in our current world reality.
We have changed the world, Grim, just in smaller ways than we thought we would when we were boys.
As for the Chan, I didn't think they cared about honor, either. As Christians, of course, there is always faith, hope, and charity.
As for the poem, if you end up wrestling with one, don't blame me. As I said, I'd never encourage it unless one was already predisposed.
What kind of art do you mainly do?
Have we changed the world? I don’t know that the world is one Odysseus could not engage in, if he spent a little time catching up on the technology.
What an interesting definition of "world." Did you expect to change the world such that it would be a new creation?
I think Odysseus would have great difficulty with the modern world. Christianity was a great change and modernity was a second great change; it's a whole new world twice over now.
Right now, I'm still in the process of getting my craft room put together after moving last summer, so....nothing-ish. I have a couple esthetics projects in process for around my home currently occupying my time. This however hasn't stopped my mind from visualizing new art pieces. I currently have two sitting on my LR table that are in the various stages of visualization. 0>;~}
Although I've mostly been working in jewelry the past five to six years, my main stuff has been American Indian genre items like dreamcatchers, beading, etc., but I'll work in pretty much anything that catches my attention. I particularly love working with wood because I really enjoy being able to "see" something in the grain/knot and making it visible to everyone.
Do you? I think the modern world has more difficulty with him, at least to judge by the controversy over the new movie. That could be healthy, though there’s a point at which stability becomes more important than exploration of ideas.
Well, imagine his culture shock alone. He could well end up in an asylum or prison.
While it's tenuous, we at least can read stories and ideas from his time. He would have no inkling of ours. So much of our world would make no sense to him.
Sounds fun.
I've been getting into wood working lately, though slowly. For a time I did some Japanese-style woodblocks for printing. I do wish I had spent more time with crafting throughout my life.
I mean, skyscrapers and airplanes would be surprises. But I doubt they’d be permanently stupefying. Many human cultures continue to exist alongside modern Western, Christian societies without being much changed from the ancient world. Not only in Africa or the South Pacific either; indeed, there’s some reason to think they are not only encountering that world but pulling it back down. The future could be more like his world than not.
Yeah, I don't see the technology as a problem.
The cultures that still have elements of the ancient have had time to adapt, though. He wouldn't have, and his gods are dead, his culture gone, the ways he made sense of things are all long gone. He wouldn't understand society or culture or have a good way to adapt. People are social. Even the hermits assume society; it is what they are withdrawn from.
But this is all hypothetical.
Maybe it would be fun to do a virtual art gallery from the regulars around here. Everyone sends in a few of their best art or craft pieces and they get assembled into a single post. I don't know if that's something Grim would like to take on or not though.
Post a Comment