Poetry and Living Lightly

Plain living and high thinking. William Wordsworth, 1802.

Words, words, words. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, c.1601.

Poetry, as Hamlet well knew, has never really been about words, but action. All poetry begins with action. All action begins with the search for one’s self. 'Poetry is an act which engenders new realities,' writes Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life; 'it is the fulfillment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence'.

It is curious to note how few poets (the commercial poets you see on the shelves) live poetically, live 'revolutionarily'. By this, I mean of course lightly and slowly. But then, their poetry isn’t really poetry. When it isn’t metaphoric marmalade or window-dressing, it’s a devilish hubbub of words, words, words, and a curious cleverness that hynotises and mesmerises but never really pares away. Poetry, however, is never about cleverness and clothing. It is a privileged state of being. If anything, it is about undressing and getting to nakedness, slowing down and learning to see and be. It is getting through to the essential energies that our civilization has sought to outsource and cover over. If there is one thing consumerist-capitalism excels at, it is out-sourcing the body’s own wellspring of energy so that it may sell the body its own energy back.

To be sure, there is a Zen aspect to poetry. Indeed, the two may well be mutually inclusive. 'When I raise my hand', says Daisetz Suzuki, 'this is Zen. But when I assert that I have raised my hand, Zen is no more'.

Or equally, the Tao:

The days flow on empty and awake; the doer has vanished into the deed. Poetry as such cannot be said to exist. It is a way of life that expresses itself. In living. 

Real poetry is cutting away that clutter (of assertion, of consumerism and coverings) and getting through to that simplicity-complexity-emptiness of living and being. Half-way poetry (which isn’t a poetry at all but a bastardization of it) runs to ornamentation and adornment.

‘As I grow older,’ said the Scottish-American industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (a man who realized poetry-as-action in his later life), ‘I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.’

There is no other realm so full of hypocrisy than that of poetry. Poets ought to be defined by their behaviour not by what they write and sell. In this way the façade will quickly crumble, and with it, the airs and the graces, and the masks.

O Friend! I know not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,
To think that now our life is only drest
For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,
Or groom!—We must run glittering like a brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest:
The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.

['Written in London. September, 1802', William Wordsworth]

'Plain Living - High Thinking... Above Govan'  (November 2012)