Understanding

"What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print." ~Isadora Duncan

I saw this quote and though what a curious thing to say. It may reveal much about my my own personal view of poetry.

There are two separate points to be made here. One is the untellable aspect that if you haven't lived my life - what I write will not mean the same to you as it means to me.

The other is that deeper aspect that sometimes what we write from the soul we don't even fully recognize ourselves. Sort of the duende that Federico García Lorca spoke of. I firmly accept the premise that there are truths from deep within that we are occasionally able to unearth in our poetry or art that remain somewhat of a mystery us and therefore cannot easily be explained to others.

Duende & the Bag We Drag Around

Getting back to duende, The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux has a chapter in it called The Shadow. In it they relate what the psychologist Carl Jung describes as our pleasant self with which we identify and our hidden self which we try to deny or reject altogether.

They go on to correlate this to what the poet Robert Bly refers to as the shadow. Our shadow is presumably a long beg we drag behind us throughout life. As we learn what others / society doesn’t like, we start “bag stuffing” or discarding into the bag what we do not wish others to see. By the time we are adults there is just this thin slice of us visible and the rest we’ve stashed in the bag we drag around.

Addonizio and Laux have pieced this altogether with Lorca’s duende (see yesterday’s post) and it is certainly easy to see where this other part of us comes from. Without committing anything to a page, one can see how our lives alone reflect this conflict. If we can dip into this bag as we write, our writing can reveal a part of us that offers a genuine picture of humanity that we do not normally identify with, yet, is very real.

I know from personal experience how hard it is to get away from self censorship. If we subconsciously withhold a grater part of ourselves in day to day life, how easy can it be to peel back the cover and let light expose that which we work so hard to deny.

My challenge is to go to that bag when I write and try my best to reach into it like I were drawing a letter while playing scrabble and just accept what comes out to incorporate it into my poetry.

Finding duende

I've been reading some material from several sources on the subject of duende. I find myself transfixed the concept of this sort of anti-muse. It's amusing that so much time and energy is focused on us finding the inspiration of our muse and yet there is beneath the surface this vast iceberg of subconsciousness that we as poets so often abnegate.

I've spoken here in the past about how so often the really striking poetry rises out of conflict. This is something Donald Hall has written about in essay. In Edward Hirsch's the demon and the angel - Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration he talks about the emergence of the duende philosophy I believe first introduced by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in a 1930 lecture. There are a variety of other poets and philosophers who speak of this same mysterious force deep within human nature. I am finding the shared view of numerous poets on this subject to be a significant part of my learning curve as it relates to poetics.

In both my own writing and in the works of other poets that I especially enjoy reading, I like to see and feel dissonance. That contrasting conflict that arises when we write from inspiration on one hand, and allow ourselves the uncensored deep rooted mysterious part of our self to come out and play in our work. It is when these two forces - internal and external are present that I believe the best writing often occurs.

Enough on this subject tonight... but I will take it up again tomorrow.