"The World We Think We See . . ."

Ari Meermans · Nov 27, 2020

The Poetry Foundation has put up an immersive interview with Margaret Atwood today: "The World We Think We See Is Only Our Best Guess: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood", which touches on the various recurring themes in her poems: politics, power, aging, and even death.

Not all poems are political, though some are, and some of mine are. But you can’t be prescriptive towards poets about their poetry without echoes of dictatorships past and present. And there have been so many attempts to make poetry into something socially useful, going all the way back to Plato, but continuing into our own day. Once prescription starts, denunciation and censorship are never far behind. Lyric poems (as opposed to epic or dramatic or narrative ballads) are meditative.

But it's her perspective on poetry and language as a means of exploration that causes me to contemplate my own attempts to make sense of it all and how those attempts might recur in the themes in my work were I to really look at them.

Poems do not assert. They explore. One of the things they explore is language.

“If there were no emptiness, there would be no life” is literally true of the universe, but figuratively true of psychic states. We know the positive by the negative. We know fullness by emptiness. We know day by night, and vice versa.

It's a short read and it might help in the exploration of themes in your work, too.

wiktorpaluch · Nov 27, 2020

Words are a funny thing, being so imperfect in trying to describe life. I mean the part of it that isn't concrete. Like she said, they are perfect to use in a contract, where things aren't abstract, but to express the human state, the emotions and the struggles without making it sound like a cliche.. that's where true poem begins, at least for me.
I don't write poems, but when I read or hear one, I know it's a poem when thanks to the mastery of the author I go pass the words and begin to feel what they felt while writing.

Words aren't good with feelings. Word "love" for instance can mean so many things..

Animad345 · Nov 29, 2020

This really stuck out to me:

There isn’t any “the future.” There are only multiple possible futures.

"The World We Think We See . . ."

Ari Meermans

MacAllister's Official Minion & Greeter

wiktorpaluch

Animad345