Poetry

As I write poetry, I write these illuminations to accompany the poem. I first started doing this after reading Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, where the haikus are accompanied by prose, and prose and haiku together make a literary form that is called haibun. But I don’t follow the rules of haibun, and I don’t write haiku.

One day it occurred to me that St. John of the Cross’s spiritual classic The Dark Night of the Soul is also a combination of poetry and prose. He wrote the poem first, and then his friends asked him to write something else, explaining it. As with haibun, his prose description related to the poem without reiterating or summarizing it.

The compactness of a poem’s thought is a thing within itself. To write poetry is to engage in a certain kind of thinking, as the pattern of words and sounds leads the poet to unexpected insights and realizations. But poetry inevitably leaves many things by the wayside. It gestures to ideas or experiences without fully explicating them. Such gesturing is part of its power, allowing for a sense of bewilderment that brings the reader back to the poem, again and again. Something always goes unsaid, and many things are spoken about tantalizingly, even if they’re stated plainly.

The same is probably true of these illuminations, and of all writing and other forms of expression. Life is too large, too various and interconnected, for any poem or painting or piece of prose or film or song to stand alone, set apart from all overlapping meanings. Nothing is sui generis except for God. Whatever we say leaves something unsaid. Yet there can be a particular kind of beauty, a particular species of hope, in the act of saying whatever we have to say.

In these posts I offer illuminations. If the poem has been published in a way that I can link to it, I’ll link to the poem. Sometimes I’ll publish poems here after enough journals and magazines have rejected them. If a poem is published in a print journal with no online edition, I’ll offer the illumination by itself, and hope that I might get a book out soon that includes the missing poems.