Ruminations on Poetry: An Introduction

[Written sometime in March, 2007]

In my attempts to write poetry, i try to master the art of concealing and paradoxically reavealing the unsaid. i strike at the surface but i try to grip what's underneath. these emotions are evasive; to capture them directly (if said, if explained like useless adjectivtes) would result in mediocrity. beneath the surface, they are meant to throb and pulse, even shine through - animating stillness, stilling despair, essaying loneliness, celebrating life. poets like sylvia plath are able to transform the most innocent of objects into instruments of rage, w.h. auden compares unrequited love to the night sky, t.s. eliot writes out the confession of a lonely man's life, fatima lim transforms love into the fragility of a bonsai plant.

it should not be necessary to determine who is intended, who inspired the author to will the poem into existence. every poem is a confession.

perhaps poems are letters not meant to be answered - to bare one's soul, as a matter of life and death, past the point of expecting any reply or reciprocity from the intended. the intended would then merge into, and form part of larger collective experience - real or imagined, to the sender. the sender-author is meant to transcend his/her own limitations, seek liberation from personal cages, turn his/her biography into the biography of the world.

this is the transformative power of poetry - and art - in that the artist who draws his or her own blood sheds it for all to wonder, and perhaps weep...

[i wrote this in 2005]

i write my poetry as weak-kneed confession.

but there is nothing to confess, really.

there is nothing real about what i write and the way i write. i try to strike at parts of myself, the parts that i think i reveal, but i reveal nothing, really.

or more accurately, there is nothing to reveal.

and that's why i can abandon my poetry and take it up again, and abandon it again and again.