Precision Vagueness
Investigating the death of poetry
Words: 767
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Poetry is dead? Yeah, definitely, and it was murdered (Thanks, T.S. Eliot). I have been using a vocabulary app for the past couple of months (this sentence is an example of what I call an “interstitial thought”). I think people take poetry - and language itself - too seriously. Which is precisely to say not serious enough. Often you read a poem and wonder “what did that mf mean?” or it sounds like gibberish, or my favorite comment “why not just write it regularly?” Great questions, here’s an answer, maybe: poetry is precision vagueness. With the help of vocabulary this goal is evermore achievable.
Words unlock the ability to make new, subtle connections between concepts and ideas while wrapping them in metaphors, analogies, and lyrical rhythm. This can have the effect of obscuring any obvious sense of meaning, but have you forgotten you are the creator of meaning, humble reader?
You see, poetry is not an art of communicating ideas, but representing them in symbolic forms that give feelings and thought new shape in the minds of others. Though, to say poetry is a sort of “precise vagueness of language” is an argument that borders on literary critique, and I don’t know how to do that. T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, expertly explains what poetry is. In his time period he wrote poetry as it was dying - as the traditional lineage of poetic knowledge fractured from romanticism to modernism in an era of world war, industrialism, and nuclear weapons. If you do not choose to read his essay, a proper literary critique, then I will supplement a portion of the summary that refers to a famous analogy he proposed:
“Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a ‘mature’ poet’s mind works by being a passive ‘receptacle’ of images, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new ‘art emotion.’ For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of a greater ability to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent
Eliot emphasized a depersonalization process that the artist must achieve: “It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.”
Scientists must achieve the same thing in their experiments by developing an objective mindset so that chosen variables are combined out of natural curiosity rather than driven by unconscious motives. The finely filiated platinum that Eliot speaks of is a catalyst. Its mere presence alone will cause oxygen and sulphur dioxide to produce sulpheric acid, but the atomic structure of the platinum is unchanged - it does not make any exchange. Platinum lowers the initial energy required for the reaction to, just, naturally proceed.
Anyway, the vocabulary app has given me all sorts of new combinations to experiment with, and now that poetry is dead it feels like an act of rebellion against the status quo. The status quo is dead, I say.
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Lightning cracks, and the mind amidst a fantasy splinters to arching electrical impulses Carving symbols into cave rock, Meaning birthed from inorganic matter, Creation at the speed of action potential, Planned perceptions and faithful attachments and branded devotion to allusive emotion; Simulated roses in eloquent poises, Gods cast from virtual shadows; a flash ignites matchstick throes, Enflamed wounds from ash-laden boons, In silence, a speech of glib malevolence Decries grandiloquence as unconscious artfulness, Paintings of self-inflicted sympathies Surrendering humanity to penitent epiphanies, Perjuring dreams from undead poetry, Engraving rings with misunderstandings from the musings of flightless doves, Quills ever stained with cureless woes; Verbose displays of wilted bouquets, Enchanting, courtly malaise Dishonors the seer to aimless nadir; Sunken dry eyes, one-way mirrors, Deflecting heartbeats from impatient ears, Silencing poets behind cheap veneers, Mysteries, stained with acid whiskey, Inhibiting drive with hopeless demise, Romanticizing lust with insipid lies; Commodifying love from furtive flames Emblazoned with trust from social games, Playing blue hearts, like broken harps, Entombed in cosmic tunes, Singing sweet nothings to 'lipsing moons from tormented shores of golden sands to caressed infinities in sunlit hands, Beholden from sleeping cocoons, and the thunder booms.