ISN'T POETRY A LITTLE ECSTATIC?

By creating a space to take us outside ourselves, poems cast an almost mystical spell. Two new collections prove the point.

To smoke a cigarette, according to the scholar of French literature Richard Klein, is “to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience.” Qui fume prie was the motto of an early French journal devoted to smoking: Who smokes, prays. Or, the smoke break is sacred. This brief span of “heightened attention,” as Klein notes in his witty aesthetic study “Cigarettes Are Sublime” (1993), is much like a poem: a space or an act that permits a little sneaky transcendence. Like prayer and spells and drugs, poetry creates the conditions for “an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.”

I’m tempted to say this outsideness is the only point of poetry: the weird thrill of saying what you’d never say in regular life. The poem grants us access to a plane where we can be someone else. The poem pleads temporary insanity.

Take “Fish,” by the ever-ecstatic D.H. Lawrence. It’s one of the most unbelievable poems I’ve ever read: 100-plus lines that attempt to describe the world of fish-life to a fish. “FISH, oh Fish,/So little matters!” it begins. “Food, and fear, and joie de vivre,/Without love.” He goes on and on, in pity and admiration (“Quelle joie de vivre/Dans l’eau!” “To be a fish!”) until finally he admits, “But I, I only wonder/And don’t know./I don’t know fishes.”

Some poems feel this way in their entirety, ecstatic outbursts or tantrums. Kenneth Patchen’s short poem “I Feel Drunk All the Time” begins with a Lawrentian exclamation: “Jesus, it’s beautiful!/Great mother of big apples, it is a pretty/World!” These are its central, anthemic lines: “I don’t know how the rest of you feel,/But I feel drunk all the time.” We can read this as an utterance of the poem itself, not of a poet or speaker from outside the poem. The poem feels drunk all the time, because these 11 lines are all the time there is, as far as the poem is concerned. The poem is a closed universe, set off in cosmic parentheses.

- Author: Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

Read more...