Should poetry transform itself as it develops? Or the reader? Or the writer?
If one is repeating the same theme and tone and skills, is there refinement? Is it radical enough? Is it slow and fine-tuned enough to not miss something key. Is it a kind of stammer, placeholder, affirming but does it need to do more, produce more? One always needs more data, right? Change your data set, change your mind set (as said in the David Candless TED talk. Is it healthy to say, good enough, let’s just reiterate? Is it healthy to continually press on regardless of where one is presuming perfection isn’t reached, thus one has to reach? But if it can’t be reached, can the desire be equally met by small circles as it could with outward expeditions thru words and styles? When is it transform for transformation’s sake instead of letting be?
Writing poetry is trying to tickle oneself, surprise oneself. As one becomes habituated, that gets harder to do. Of course some are easily amused or easily tangled. But to fall into that sweet groove of reading or writing, there has to be some sort of soothe or ping or both. If at the end you are where you began and only time has passed and not a blessed thought or change of perspective or chemistry, then why continue except to see if there is something to gain around the next bend or the next.
Serena Trowbridge said in her post dangerous words and how they can change the world,
“To read poetry properly – to take in what it says, to enjoy the language rolling through you, to consider seriously the words and the meaning(s) behind them, is dangerous stuff. If people read more poetry, the world would be a better place, but the order of things as we know it would be upset, and we would all become minor revolutionaries.”
She also points out how poetry is charged as being pointless and toothless and how that is partly a by-product of practice, partly perception, and partly selective definition.
If you count only as poetic as that which wells up, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, as Wordsworth said, that “relegates poetry to the personal and the immediate – not in itself a bad thing – but it strips it of skill, of political importance, of wide-reaching relevance, and instead equates all poetry as a necessary release of emotion”.
Not a complete picture of all it can be, just a subset of what some of it is. But what is is process, not end product, definitively It. Everything can’t be It. But that doesn’t mean life and literature must be put on hold and suppressed until the next lily pad of It grows. If you lop off all the not mature lily pads, you’ll never get a useful sized one to hop on.
Does one poem or work or book have the power to transform even a step by itself? There’s the occasional mind-blowing pivot. But that doesn’t relegate the rest as dreck. Part of the change is being present thru the thick of the data, through the longitudinal, seeing the small navigational shifts, the trends from all directions, the constants. Something that is the best of is largely meaningless outside the rest of. The transforming is not the product but the habit of trying to make the product, read the product.