Poetry and Art

I have decided to post a few of my poems. I have a lot more, but I can't find them. They'll turn up eventually, and as they do, I'll add them. First, a few thoughts. If singing makes you happy, then you are a good singer. In my view, this is the point of singing. It can and often is done well by people who have lost their connection with it. Those are bad singers. (Note: if you can't sing, don't subject anyone but your closest friends to it; but sing when it is appropriate. Sing because you are happy. Sing because it feels right. Clearly, some people have both talent and sincerity. I am by no means implying those are not the people who belong on stage.) Likewise, if writing or reading poetry makes you feel better, or deepens your capacity for emotional expression--which is to say perceptual capacity, aka depth--then it is good. Wilde was quite right that all bad poetry is sincere, but he was wrong in assuming that the point of poetry is anything OTHER than sincerity. Yes, it can be a craft, but as such is no different than building model airplanes, or rock gardens. What interests me is its utility in forming and expressing personalities and identities. It seems to me that all art should have as its purpose teaching us to feel more skillfully--in the sense of emoting as a skill that can be done more and less competently. It should have as its purpose, in other words, teaching individual and social maturity. I have never made this connection explicitly, but Goodness, as I define it, is very simply an expression of personal growth, and hence maturity. And what is the role of emotion, after all? As I see it, it is one of the best means of conquering what I suppose I could call our primal solitude, our isolation. Griefs and joys can both be shared, can't they? What are the emotions we consider negative? Those we do not want shared, like anger and greed and self pity. All of us have a need both for independence, and for submersion in something larger. It seems to me the more you can move in both directions, the healthier you are. You need both complete independence of thought and action, and the capacity to lose yourself in love and connection. I image this to myself as the duality of matter, which is both particle and wave. Which one it is at any moment depends entirely on what you need it to be. As I think about it, tragic theater needs in many respects to be seen as a social phenomenon. A core purpose is SHARED pathos, shared grief. We forget this since we generally READ Shakespeare, as an example; we do not EXPERIENCE his work. My poems are really quite simple, and in the time I wrote them they were very helpful. Most of them are what I call "motion" poems. My thought process is really simple: you cannot start, emotionally, from anywhere but where you are, however silly and ridiculous it may be. Deep grief in particular always looks ridiculous, but it is something quite different for the person experiencing it. Anway, whatever you are feeling--and it can be joy--you need to get it out to see it, and hold back nothing. Since, in most cases, you actually want to be somewhere else, you move there. You end with a state of hope. My form, obviously, is in most cases haiku. I like haiku both because it is easy, and because the restrictions sometimes force words that would otherwise not have come to me. Anyway, please take these not as works of art, but rather as examples of what YOU can do, if you choose. It is not false modesty which compels me to point out these poems really are mediocre; yet, they made me feel better. As I have defined the matter, this makes them good poems, even if they make other people laugh or roll their eyes. It is precisely to show that lack of talent and catharsis are quite compatible that I am posting them. Some are almost comically maudlin, and beg for charity, but that is the way I felt, then. We are all ridiculous at times, so I feel no shame in showing some aspects of my particular version of that theme. All three of these were written in a period of acute difficulty in my life.