Statement For the Modern Poetry Conference at Cuny

STATEMENT FOR THE MODERN POETRY CONFERENCE AT CUNY



I suppose poetry is
Listening Out Loud

And what one listens to is language --

language in one's head

(only a fool would confuse that with himself
thinking

only a fool would think the things that he hears
languaging in him
are things that he himself is thinking)

Most poets are too smart to believe
in their own intelligence.

Witless, clueless, we await a sign.

Pindar tells us a sign is never clear
(at least a sign from Zeus) --
hence the poem veers towards a kind of
lucid incomprehensibility,

[Eventually after a few hundred or thousand years
we begin to comprehend the incomprehensible --
Dante, Aeschylus, Milton -- and they become
classics and become of great celebrity
but diminished use.
But till then the texts are of great power,
startling, provoking, eliciting.
Some grand provokers -- Pindar himself,
Li shang-yin, Lycophron, Hoelderlin, Stein --
still wait their turn,
still turn us towards the poem we must write,
the poem they force us to write,
to make sense of what they do to our heads.]

The incomprehensible provokes the reader
to acts of preternatural awareness.

This incomprehensibility factor is
what the ancient Greeks called Mousa, Muse.
[The Spartans -- sturdy workmen, who would
have liked the sacred gizmos of Elshtain's gnoetry --
called her Moha.]
(I told her I would work her into this evening.)

The incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense.
That is, it creates sense --
the sense of something happening to you as you read.

And that's the only happening poetry has?

The luster of listening.

Or what we hear in poetry is groans
from the battlefield
where time struggles against space.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on his homepage Robert Kelly