The Poetry of secret places

wth Nicanor Parra, and Kent Johnson

It is such a secret place, the land of tears.*

In the place where lost things live, words unborn, wait, as vacant eyes streaming tears in the red haze. Old film reels bookmark pages that hum with the machinery of sight. The world careens into slow penance. The pen is a boy wandering through the side-streets, kicking dust with a careless vengeance. The word for the feeling of nostalgia for a place that lives only in the imagination, is home. Something sits at the end of the long dark, as ephemeral as purple smoke. Sometimes, when you are in search of a ghost, you come to know a place. This other knowledge, born out of rupture, smarts in the gathering dark. The crack that appears, is absence gone sour.

Meanwhile…. a sharp sound tears the landscape into two. A car roars awake, and settles into a gentle purr. The road curves past a yellow field. Crows explode into velvet smithereens, pinched from the flaming wheat. This is a picture that is slowly being processed in the dark room. A thin sliver of light seeps into the room. Something rustles past the furniture. Language is about to be born; a squalling babe more alive in the screaming. The poetic image leaps out, as a side act, almost; an afterthought.

It is a secret place - the place where poetry is formed. In the antechamber, where thoughts go before they die, the poet realises the possibility of life - a life in words. At that moment, the body melts into testimony, and the poem is coaxed into being, as evidence. He peels off the thin film of a reality that surges beyond the flesh, and hangs it on a peg of sounds, more legible than music. Not for you, this flaying.

What is the poet’s own, is everybody’s, as poetry.

*From The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint Exupery

Parra’s poet frees conceits imprisoned within empty landscapes, shorn of words. It calls for an abandonment, antithetical to the greedy clasp of form. It gives licence to the young poet. The poet Kent Johnson responds to this poem in an erratic manual on form and sensibility – a catalogue of instructions for the poet. I will share only a few choice lines from the poem, below.

From ‘33 Rules of Poetry’ (After Nicanor Parra)

2. Don’t suck up to other poets. Well, OK, you will do so, of course, like all poets do, but when you do, feel it in your bones. Take this self-knowledge and turn it into a weapon you wield without mercy.

9. Don’t worry if you have social anxiety at poetry events. Most everyone else will be as secretly anxious as you are.

13. After reading Roland Barthes’s famous essay on it, watch professional wrestling at least once a month. Reflect on how the spectacle corresponds, profoundly, to the poetry field.

14. Go on your nerve, and whenever you feel you shouldn’t, do.

19. If you don’t know another language, make it your mission, as I suggested earlier, to learn one. Translation is the very soil of poetry. Its mystery.

21. Whenever you are in doubt about being a poet, instead of, say, being an architect or a physicist, or something of the superior sort, remind yourself of Leibniz’s immortal question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (Keep this question in your pocket against your heart. Because no one can ever answer it, it is the key to your purpose.)

27. If you feel you have wasted your young life so far writing poetry, that writing poetry was a fool’s, a loser’s pursuit, and you sense despair and absolute darkness before you, well, you are surely on the second step. There is no shame in turning back and leaving it all behind. Turn back without regret. On the other hand, if you are crazed and brave and you put your queer shoulder to the wheel, much wonder, blessedness, and inexpressible sorrow awaits.

30. Read Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese and One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese. If someone tells you there are two kinds of poetry, chuckle gently.

31. Look in the mirror and be honest. You are going to die. But right now you’re alive... Look really hard. This is fucking astonishing. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Find the complete poem on Almost Island, here
I must thank Vivek Narayanan, and Almost Island for these two finds.

The two poems, echo from two ends of a corridor. I walk through this corridor everyday. I listen to Barthes, and Wittgenstein, eavesdropping on eternity, snatching at gold coins. I attempt to translate silences. Sometimes watching resolves itself into meaning, into the future. This is the end of poetry. Nothing more needs to be said. What is there, will always be there.

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April is here. The days are long now, and simmering.
Hope you are finding the space to write.

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