Porous poison

There are times when I allow myself to write in a free flowing manner that tolerates what I would imagine is my subconscious influence upon the written product. While I recognize the term subconscious is perhaps passe in many academic settings, I am referring to an influence by that part of one's mind that one cannot be entirely aware of, yet still exerts some influence upon one's actions without concentrated efforts at thought.

The outcome of such writing will often produce some interesting word combinations. A small example for instance might be something that came out on the page last night, in a line that that contained these two words together: porous poison. Now in reality, I don't imagine poison as being porous. I can see poison seeping into porous cracks - perhaps an insecticide. That is a perfectly clear picture.

Still, I find allowing myself this broad freedom of expression in writing a liberating experience because it certainly seems to negate self imposed censorship. Such censorship I believe to be a great source of obstruction to the risk taking necessary to advance any form of art.

The question I still must deal with at some point, is deciding how much of such abstraction to allow into a poem. It is something which I do not presently have an answer for, though I remain devoted to some rational answer.

Let it be...

I was thinking today about non-literary art and the fact that you often see an accompanying artists statement of purpose with it. I thought about the application of the same to poetry. The irony of a written summation of another piece of "word art."

I suppose we do often see such a critter inside the flap of a poetry book where the reader is offered some general statement of purpose relative to the entire manuscript. Otherwise, we don't see this with individual poetry.

With more abstract work it would perhaps not be as odd. Still, there is a tendency by many poets, myself included to want let the reader experience the work themselves. Drawing from their own life experiences whatever it is that speaks to them in the poem. As MacLeish argues in Ars Poetica, [the] poem should not mean But be.