Why Write Poetry?

If one of the purposes of poetry is to be a 'means of redemption' as has been suggested, another question we might ask of ourselves is 'why do I want to write poetry'? I continue to be amazed by how many people, writers included, who seem to feel that we write poetry as a means of making visible the deep emotions that churn deep inside us. Well, if that is true, what do we make of Wordsworth's Daffodils or Keat's To Autumn for instance?

A friend stopped me on the street last week. I had not seen her for two years, and as we caught up with each other, she told me that she was in a poetry group and really wanted to 'get published and have an ISBN number'. No deep emotional material to expose there then? We will all have different reasons for writing poetry and if we go back to Hart Crane's Bridge and look at my friends reason for writing poetry, we can perhaps see even here the new vistas of Crane and the redemptive purpose in poetry as my friend seeks to turn dreams to reality.

Feel free to post your poem to this blog...you will retain full copyright while giving yourself a hoist up onto the bridge.

Are you on the bridge yet?

The First Inspired Words

If anyone ever asked me where I gained my interest and love for poetry...It was in a primary school in the city of Leeds, England. I was just 5 years old....and here it is and it still stirs me and makes my hair stand on end:

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest's ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
"Is there anybody there?" he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

 

Thank you WDLM.

Dawn Treader

Waking Silence

I wonder did you stir at six to hear the morning mist

Slip silently from the slumbering streets?

Or if you heard the noiseless spreading of the Swallow’s wings

Tumbling from the icy wire in search of warmer air?

I heard you as you tiptoed through my shivering dreams

In ghost-like slippers floating;

And like the mist's cool residue and Swallow’s after-breeze,

You brushed me as you passed

© David McLoughlin 2009

Why Write Poetry?

Have you ever asked yourself why you write poetry. Many reasons have been given and much written as to why we write poetry and what is its purpose. I like and have made personal to me the statement by the poet Wallace Stevens that, 'poetry is a means of redemption'. What he meant was, that poetry awakened within us our God-like powers, powers to recreate the world through imagination.

This has been taken on special meaning for me, and poetry is for me now a means of redemption...a bridge as Hart Crane reminds us in his poem of the same name, that takes us to new vistas, new worlds, new experiences and the worlds that lie beyond. Like gods, we can fly.

I look forward to seeing how your imagination takes you across the bridge.

Bridges

I often joke about the poet in his garret, partly because I have been there and I knew amazing poets who were there. Sometimes it is easy to stay within the closed confines of our private thoughts, afraid to commit those thoughts to paper as words. Fear of any kind is the raging torrent and we need a bridge to take us over to new thresholds of understanding, seeing, experiencing, then, having left the garret behind, new worlds become ours.

The poet has many bridges to cross and each one leads to new vistas, new opportunities, new possibilities and, even a new self. For T S Eliot modernity, the carnage of war and the death of God saw the bridges falling down, old hopes crumbling. In Hart Crane's poem The Bridge, the emphasis is not on what is lost in modernity but what is found or what might be:

New thresholds, new anatomies, wine talons
Build freedom up about me and distill
This competence to travel in a tier
Sparkling alone within another's will.

Why not read it and become inspired to cross the bridge between your mind and the page, your world and the world of the other, your circumstances and what you see on the other side...and any other bridge you need to cross. Poetry will elevate you to that tier and the sparkling of another's will.

I look forward to your posts and your poetry.