POETRY, THE BEST MEANS TO EXPRESS CONVICTIONS AND BELIEF

Poetry is verbal expression in which a limit is imposed on the number of words used and the words are selected for their emotional and intellectual impact and for their musicality and rhythm. That’s an initial attempt at defining this art form that I have spent a lifetime engaging in. I define it because the theme of why I write continues to be my subject, only this time I am narrowing my scope to a specific writing type.

I need to add a whole other kind of consideration. If poetry were only an art form marked by restraint, musicality and rhythm I might not have bothered with it, but I was also attracted by characteristics I venerated in the works of greats like William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and many others.

I Will Mean

I write poetry because I believe that poetry is the best means to express convictions and belief. In this respect, I see poetry and religion as not wholly separate activities. It is what I meant when I elected to use the title “I Will Mean” for my first book of poetry. As a writer of poetry, I want my work to be significant for you and for me. By significant I mean that I am striving for a premonition of permanence, a feeling of concreteness, a sense of truth. Another way to look at it is that poetry is a means to use words to achieve a feeling of comfort with oneself and with one’s place in the stream of experience that is our totality.

The words “striving” and “arrive” are very telling in this case. I like to write poems that involve discovery, that involve bringing the reader/listener on a metaphorical voyage in which I and my reader/listener end up wiser than when we started out.

Too Quick With The Rules

When I was younger, I admit that I was capable of erring on the side of dogmatism. I was a bit too quick to impose rules in order to define what I meant by good and bad poetry. Now I would like what I am saying to be thought of as a personal aesthetic. This is what I am about when I write poetry, but I do not insist that anyone else adopt my principles. And, yes, as a reader of poetry I have found pleasure in works that I would not have written myself, works that adhere to a set of apparent principles that are not my own.

Art in general needs to be open, welcoming, accepting of diversity of points of view and methods. I believe that, and I am not comfortable setting myself up as some kind of czar of the right way to write.

Value “Reachingness”

Having said that, I do need to reaffirm at least one of my older principles. All that I ask of another poet is that you place a premium on what I call the “reachingness” of your work. If I am going to invest the time in reading and attempting to understand and appreciate your poetry, I need to have the sense that you meet me half way, that you care whether you reach me. If after reading your poem several times, nothing sticks, that is, I come away as confused as at the first reading, then I have to conclude that you failed, that it is not my problem as reader. It’s your problem as writer, that I wasted my time with your work.

Even our most prestigious literary publications have not always done a good job with their poetry. A case in point is The New Yorker. I have been a full time reader of this magazine for the last several years. During that time, I have been a dedicated reader of The New Yorker poetry and have usually felt that my time with these poems was very well spent. In recent years I think the poetry has been especially good—noticeably better than in the years before, no doubt owing to the ascendancy of a new editor-in-chief, David Remnick. That said, however, there are still exceptions.

Spy’s Clandestine Code

The exception in the latest issue is entitled “The Onion Poem” (The New Yorker, Dec. 24 & 31, 2007, p. 106). Nice title, yes? The title is the only good thing about this 18-line conglomeration arranged in nine sets of couplets. If there is anything to be derived from this mess, it will have to be explained in a prose paraphrase because the poem itself is a jumble of images that might work as provider of a spy’s clandestine code, but for nothing else.

I have to quickly add that this same issue includes two very fine poems by Grace Paley—“One Day” (page 84) and “Suddenly There’s Poughkeepsie” (page 116). I especially enjoyed the latter.

Time to put up or shut up. What contribution am I prepared to make to the fine art of poetry writing? Here’s a poem I recently completed entitled “The Great Unity.”

THE GREAT UNITY

Tick Tock, Tick Tock.
The clock marks the tightening of constraints.
Divided by the labels that organize.
Thoughts confined, stratified,
Day by day talking less to him and her.
Walls rise. The gulf adding to its size.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock.
Thoughts completed by their gaps.
And we become a Babel
of believers too committed for understanding,
partisans of the one true truth
that also excludes, ignores, denies.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock.
Life as the egg divider.
Everything in its compartment.
Everything has its place—
until lacking any superior vision
there is no chance for peace.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock.
Too much definition.
Too much separation. Too much wall.
And soon there is blood on those walls —
hatred, torture, slaughter of innocents,
anguish, the death of the young.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock.
Time to work for a reordering inside the head,
a relearning how to see and how to hear,
learning the sanctification of clarity,
learning comfort with the totality,
learning real love and the great unity,
the becoming one with the everyone, the all.

STEPHEN ALAN SAFT

For more on my writing including poetry, see these web sites: http://www.sasaftwrites.com
http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

WHY I WRITE, THE PURPOSE OF MIND CHECK REVISITED

I am pleased to announce that I have launched a new website using the following address: http://www.sasaftwrites.com. The purpose of sasaftwrites is to serve as a comprehensive reference for all of my writing and to make it easier for the Internet user to find me. For example, sasaftwrites will contain the first few paragraphs of each of my Mind Check postings at the time each is posted.

At sasaftwrites, the website visitor will also find one of my poems, a synopsis of one of my novels, and an excerpt of one of my plays. In addition, I hope to be adding an index of the many topics that I have covered in Mind Check since starting the blog in early 2007.

The Moral Imperative

As the current year draws to a close and a new one looms ahead, this is a good opportunity to revisit the subject of why I am doing the Mind Check blog and in fact why I am motivated to write period. When I first started Mind Check, I said I had a purpose and that that purpose contained within it a moral imperative, namely to make myself better and in so doing to do my small part in making the world a better place.

Specifically I was dealing with the intersection of mind and that external to the mind which I will call “the other”—the other as linked to “I” by that metaphorical bridge we call writing. At the center of this process are the groupings of words with their rules that we call language. The concept that explains words and language is known as communication. Communication is also another way of explaining this intersection of self and other.

Informing Myself What I Think

Okay, so getting down to basics, why am I writing? I write to bring out what I believe for my own benefit and for that of others because I believe that I have something to say that has value to me and to others. And I write because I must, because the need to write is very strong inside me.

Is one of the things I am saying that I do not know my own mind without resorting to the process of writing to bring out the ideas inside my head? That’s exactly what I am saying. My thoughts exist inside my head as fragments, as the incomplete parts of a whole. I need the writing process to objectify those fragments, that is to put them outside of myself to improve my ability to see them or understand them and thereby to aid my mind in filling in the gaps in logic or reasoning and imposing on them a structure.

Pursuit of Fame and Glory

When I was younger I also had another motive for writing, and that was to win myself what I perceived as fame and glory. I believe that such a motive is common among younger writers, and I am pleased that it is not nearly as strong in me as it once was. The pursuit of fame and glory is a good way to add to one’s unhappiness.

Let’s look at the concept of morality and see how it fits in with the topic at hand. The issue of morality must be brought into this discussion because earlier I used the value judgment concept of using writing to make myself better and the world a better place. The key words are “value,” “judgment,” and “better.” All three words raise the probability that a morality is at work in what I am saying.

Code to Measure Against

Morality is a code of behavior or a standard of behavior against which attitudes and behaviors can be measured and having to do with judgments or values, underlying which are the concept of good and evil. That said I have to quickly play devil’s advocate and admit that if writing were inherently a moral act, then what we call hate literature would not exist. As a subset of communication employing language, writing is a way for the self to reach the other. However, we may choose to use writing to exhort the other to hate.

On the other hand, I still believe that by aiding the process of objectification referred to earlier, writing facilitates our being able to see what is moral and what is immoral, what is right and what is wrong more easily. This is why all of the literature acknowledged to be great (admittedly another value judgment) is moral. The fact is morality and aesthetic judgments are inextricably bound together.

Stilted Morals in Literature

The last two statements urgently need clarification. Do I mean that all literature acknowledged to be great has a moral, that is, that it contains a statement of precepts having to do with right and wrong? I do not. In fact, such literature is often quite stilted and is often anything but great.

Do I mean that great literature always presents its subject in a morally positive manner in order to convey its supposed message? If that were the case we would have a very difficult time coming up with a fair assessment of the tragedies of the ancient Greeks—Oedipus Rex and Medea, for example—or the tragedies of Shakespeare such as Hamlet, to cite a small number of examples.

Example of Medea

No, I mean that great literature even when the subject is powerfully negative--a mother who murders her children, as in Medea, for example--derives its power from the presupposition and the foreshadowing of a moral universe in which such behavior is a gross violation.

An exposition of the underpinnings of mortality—the concepts of right and wrong—can only take us so far. Ultimately we must acknowledge the need for a leap beyond reason into a realm where what we know we know before reason or we know before experience, a concept encompassed in the word “apriori.” Whether we are deeply religious or consider ourselves not religious at all, even an atheist, we cannot free ourselves from value systems. They are hard wired into our brains and have everything to do with how we look at the world and how we communicate with others.

Twisting of Values

Yes, but values can be twisted as in the example of hate literature cited earlier. Correct. If this twisting takes place (alert, value system again at work!), the mind is capable of knowing that some defect in reasoning has taken place, although it may not do so. Hence we have people, too many of them, who are steadfast in their hatreds.

The logic behind behaviors and actions deemed to be good is quite compelling, and it is good to remind ourselves of it frequently. However, ultimately the mind has to make a leap and accept the proposition that correct action is good action because it is good because it is the right thing to do. For religious people this is what faith is all about. For them it is a basis, perhaps the most important one for some, for a belief in God.

A very happy new year to you all.

To reach the author of Mind Check, write Stephen.saft@gmail.com. Comprehensive website at http://www.sasaftwrites.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft