If the Poetic Speaks Upon an Echo

Elusiveness of meaning closes in on us.

What’s beyond us confronts us and, if we hear what’s empty in vain explanation, resonances would have us answer our own rhetorical questions. Why is this happening? Here I’ll attempt to reach with prose the “poetic” because the poetic itself isn’t a form, but an intimation. In intimacy with Meaning.

At the heart of every relationship is alarm (including relationship with God, nothing, or the world). Wake up! Or, if you hit the snooze button, curl up in the comforter of your half-dreaming pleasure in warmth of existence. The day will come.

The poetic - no matter mere poems and poetry - tries for your attention; yet, it will bypass you if you let it. Distance in an instant, its disclosure wastes no lingering. To approach the poetic, allow approach: something up to this moment unutterable brought to a murmur. As Logos, despite proclamation as The Word, what whispers isn’t definitively descriptive, declarative, explanatory, nor is it reverberation of self (in no way does such talk reflect “expression”); it’s a summons - without an actual hold on us, no more than a breath across the cheek. Such calling doesn’t need to be sourced in the irrational, even if it does tickle your ear, give you chills up and down your spine, finger touch of the mysteries. The poetic suggests bracing for the real. After all, I mention Logos in the mightiness of Heraclitus’ usage, whereby his oracular fragments ring with Truth in the eternal fire splendor of their pure poetry. On the other hand - and I think fate is implicit in all this - it was in Parmenides’ poem that the first (or proto-)syllogisms arrived and it is the rhythm and balance of inference which makes it unsettling to evade such consistency of if this then that, its equilibrium “therefore” placing a lock on non-contradiction - from the measures (meter) of Logos, an arguable order of logic. Thus, thought gets locked in by its necessity, and linked and locked by what is fitting and due, “poetic justice,” in accordance with an inkling for what closes in on what’s already close to us, what’s dear in the lyric, that poetic link to a deepest need for something real, something justifying and true, and therefore, indeed - a calling.

So, a first step in coming to terms with the first term of this project’s title, Poetry. Poetry is what’s left of the echo-riding poetic, what comes to words from a sensing and perceptual anticipating of sudden understanding bannered in glory. The poetic itself is primary. However heaven-sent in beauty and truth, it needn’t be limned in starlight; it can be an everyday dawn’s modest touch of earthly hope on the autumnal leaf. In every sense, the sense of the poetic.

Know this is no offering of a poetics. I’ve always been more passionate than analytic for whatever creative significance gets through to me; if I do theorize, theory comes after the fact. Creativity itself is antithetical to the theoretical which can produce only jingly-jangly mechanism, not music. What strikes me is what will influence me; not some imposed or passed along (false prophet/false poet) auto-authoritative logic regarding the poetic, especially with emergence of the former from the latter, QED! Poetics is navigational at best - echolocations, if not echolalia.