The Mystery of Language

I see a relationship between impressionism, some kinds of abstract paintings, and the poetry I want to write���of just suggesting something. Giving only enough information/detail to set the readers��� imagination working. I don’t want everything spelled out. I want mystery in my poems (and my prose)���new worlds.

I love this Rothko quote: “Mark Rothko, painting his stripes in Greece, was asked: ���Why don’t you paint our temples.’ He replied: ‘Everything I paint is a temple.���”

I’d like to think that everything I write is one. There seems some evidence for the idea that we are changed by the things we create���actually shaped by them. Ralph Ellison shares this idea. He says the novels we write create us as much as we create them.

My husband and I got into a discussion of poetry and our different approaches to it, his training being in new criticism, mine in more contemporary work. He recognizes that I���m onto something Melville was alluding to in Moby Dick���the gap between language and what it tries to depict…how language organizes and creates our way of seeing.

After this conversation, we looked at some poems I had written recently, and he was reading them differently. This time he was able to grasp what I was doing. We talked of how our training can shut us down, put blinders on us. He said, “Joseph Brodsky believes language has a life outside of us and uses the writer.

I agree. I think it’s true that in the beginning was the word. Language is absolutely mysterious in its relationship to humans and the things it touches.

 

 

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