In all this is what Howard Nemerov refers to poetry “as literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm…. Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possibly—under some definitions—the primal and primary form of languages themselves.” Primal and primary underscore the oldness of poetry, the reason why Nemerov mentions religion in the same breath. If we look at language as basic articulation of experience, we are brought forward into the chronicling of a tribe’s or a people’s experience, which is, of course, no other than culture and history. History is mainly a prose narrative written by persons may or may not have witnessed unfolding events, but poetry is the recreation of the experience including the emotional responses of a hypothetical witness. And the pain of witness? (Or the impulse and compulsion, the urge?) Ah, this is a personal story to be written not by me but by each poet. It is this “recollection in tranquility” (Wordsworth) and the sense created by the sound of the words that offers the first distinction between prose and poetry, or what Wallace Stevens saw as the interaction of reality and what man can make of reality in his own mind. Again this makes me go back to my experience of poetry. What are the elements or qualities that make it different from prose? The question also goes back to How is it experienced?  T.S. Eliot suggested that “part of the difficulty lies in the fact that there is the technical term verse to go with the term poetry, while there is no equivalent technical term to distinguish the mechanical part of prose and make the relation symmetrical.” The French poet Paul Valéry said that if prose was walking, then poetry was dancing.

 

On this note, I’d like to quote myself with a poem called “Dance,” a sort of ars poetica that tries to recreate what Paul Valery referred to as the terpsichorean quality of poetry (again, Terpsichore is the muse of both poetry and dance!). It is also an ekphrastic poem, one that is based on or triggered by a picture or image, a visual work of art (ekphrazein, 'ex-phrase', call out, like Adam first calling out the names of all Creation), in this case a photograph by the artist and sculptor Manuel Baldemor. I will not show the picture itself but ask you, dear reader, to recreate the image in your mind as the poem unfolds.

​

[For the FULL TEXT of the poem, click here: "Dance"] 

 

Marne Kilates

(13 December 2021)

​

​

​

​