Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking

by Robert Bringhurst

There will be nothing in the end, and that is everything that ever was and will be.

Yet what-is is sometimes every bit as resonant and clear as nothing ever could be.

What-is will be what has been soon enough, and then its having been will sing its silent song...

I like thick socks and heavy shirts because I live in a cold country, but all my theories are threadbare. All I have ever asked a theory to do is help me, like a bowline or a compass, get from one ledge or campsite to another.

But the sun itself is mortal, like all the stars, flowers, snowflakes, faces, weathered rocks, and other funnels and channels of meaning.

Mortality, I guess, is one way meaning gets around: how it limps and jumps from day to day and place to place, once in a while in fancy dr...

I think a theory worth its salt is likely not to be the blueprint for a dream house but closer to a proverb: the oatcake of experience that common sense is spread on, for the go...

Poetry is the name, in my dialect, of a constituent or property of being. Like shapeliness and grace, symmetry and love, it must be made as well as found, but it is made, it seems to me, by many creatures other than human beings, and found in countless contexts far from human language. I try not to use the word as the collective plural...

if this usage is correct - if poetry is implicit in reality, and present in the lives of other creatures as well as in our own - then the genuine study of poetry might in fact be worth our while - more so, perhaps, than the...

Suppose we then began to study human poetry in the context of whatever we can learn about the poetry of other living creatures, and in the underlying context of the poetry of what-is. is there any chance that this might do us any good?That it might help us, for example, to find out where we live,...

A meditation on that theme - the imminent loss of linguistic and cultural, as well as biological, diversity - might have to double as a prayer. And I am not sure such a prayer could...

I don't know how poetry knows. What it knows I also cannot say, though I have heard poetry say it, so I know it in that passive sense. That it knows seems to me only a kind of tautology poorly phrased. I would rather say that poetry is one among the many forms of knowing, and maybe it is knowing in the purest form we know. I would rather say that knowing freed from the agenda of possession and control - knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being, hearing and echoing the music and heartbeat of being - is what we mean by poetry.

Physics, as it grows farther from manipulation, seems to grow more and more toward poetry, bringing mathematics with it. Biology,

Chi...

What poetry knows, or what it strives to know, is the dancing at the heart of being.

Does poetry know it differently? How separate can knowing be from the language in which it is cradled and nurtured, or in which it is (always imperfectly) enshrined? In poetry the gestures - which are still only gestures, not scripture, not fixed text, but gestures, like a dancer's gestures - keep turning into words, which want to sink back into meaning.

Poetry is knowing. Knowing is moving in t...

The feet are the link between earth and the body. Begin there. The lungs are the link between body and air. The hands, these uprooted feet, are the means Of our shaping and grasping. Clasp them. The eyes are the hands of the head; its feet are the ears.

Poets make things. True enough. But they don't make poetry, or they don't make it from nothing. Poetry is present to begin with; it is there, and poets answer it if they can. The poem is the trace of the poet's joining in knowing. its one and only use in this world is to honor the gods, the dead, and other nonhumans and humans - to honor being, in other words - and maybe to honor nonbeing as well - by allowing others to join in that knowing.

writing is merely a confirmation of speech.

writing reveals nothing new about the meaning of human language unless it uncovers links between languages, or sounds the ancestors...

Poetry nevertheless knows what it is, like the yarrow and the nuthatch, and poetry will tell us, while the etymologists and commentators - and even poets themselves - can very rarely do so.

Visually, what the sentence used to say is, "Poetry speaks the mindheart of (rebirth, the thought and feeling of creation."

move to the tune is thinking. But there is not just one tune to move to, or) ust one thought to think.

Knowing is not a paying job with pension and benefits, and it is not a steady state.

Mountain means the wild, in the earth and in the mind. It means the living system, not a replica managed by humans for human ends. Mountains are where humans, with their self-centered notions of order and management, and their narrow definitions of profit and economy, have not yet reached, or have not yet taken control. Greed and fear will pose a question: How can the home of knowing be where human organization has not reached? But every voyage into the mountains will furnish the answer: it cannot be anywhere else.

i narrative poetry (mythopoeia); z the poetry of ideas (noiopoiea); 3 the poetry of personality or character (ethopoeia) - which would include dramatic monologue, etc.; 4 language poetry (logopoeia); 5 song poetry (melopoeia); 6 performance poetry (optopoeia) - including the typographical performance poetry known as "concrete."

This is a longer, and possibly better, list than Ezra Pound's, which includes three genres only: logopoeia, melopoeia, and phanopoeia. Pound's phanopoeia (the poetry of images) might, of course, be added to the list, or it might be understood as one variety of the poetry of ideas. And ethopoeia may, I grant, seem like a strange and suspect name for something all too obvious and familiar. Ethopoeia is at present the dominant genre of poetry in English and most other Indo-European languages - so dominant perhaps that it seems not to need a name. But it was only a minor genre in early Greek. And in Native American oral literatures it is very rare indeed.

The dance is light, and where it is is darkness. it is heard or felt, in my experience, more often than it is seen, but others have sensed it differently. And the poem attempts to speak it. The poem unfolds this dance into speech rhythms and pauses, vowels and consonants, lexemes and phonemes, propositions and intonations, voices and words. But those are not the poetry. Those are the poem's linguistic flesh and acoustic skin, but not its essence or its skeleton. Poetry's bones are the bones of the dance: not movements and pauses as such, but meaningful units of movement and pause, which is to say images and events. It may be that those two elements alone, which are one thing in two forms, moving and still, suffice to understand it.

Knowing is to story as sacredness is to song.

Where is poetry in all this? Simple. It is everywhere.

Poetry is knowing, but verse is a form, a technique, a device. At worst, it is merely a grate through which language is pushed. At its best, however, verse is more like a paddler's stroke or a jogger's gait. it is the steady but adaptable lope of the mind and the voice, improvising their way across the strait or down the river or over the ground.

Linguistic rhythms are rooted in physiological rhythms - in muscle, blood, and breath - which are rooted in the air and in the ground. They answer to the rhythms of the world we inhabit: night and day, darkness and moonlight, summer and winter, wet season and dry. And where are those rhythms rooted? A durable subject for meditation.

Welcome or not, these rhythms leak into poems. So do the shapes and rhythms of assumptions we may never have known we shared. What we hear in many poems is institutional or habitual form: the stride of fixed opinion, not the brief ecstatic dance; not the wary step that gauges every syllable, or the distance runner's meditative pace, subtly changing with the changing ground.

A song or story truly heard is a feast enjoyed, a meal consumed, a strength acquired.

Language is not a beast to be yoked and harnessed but an independent being whose powers may contradict or amplify one's own.

Peoples who plant crops in orderly rows and put animals into pens, generally speaking, make a garden of language too. Their poets and storytellers domesticate the rhythms and patterns of speech into the forms we know as verse. When cultures begin to take dominion over the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms, they ordinarily seek dominion over the fourth kingdom, the realm of language also. Versification becomes, like history, a method of terracing, planting, and harvesting...

The poet and the smith have much in common in the bronze-age world, where the military aristocracy offers...

But elaborate and ingenious forms of verse - oral high technology - are no guarantee of range or depth in poetry. Skill in handling these forms, like skill with software, keyboard, and mouse, or skill at the much more tangible art of c...

Verse in this institutional sense is worked language, farmed language - and poetry, like other forms of knowing, is a kind of food. But farming does not, strictly speaking, create food; farming regulates its production, reduces its variety, and sometimes increases its yield. That, I think, is the...

Still, symmetry and consonance and recurrence are deeply precious commodities in a...

Beauty is a tool of propagation and a tactic of survival, used by men, women, deer, horses, dogs, flowers, pine trees, and by poems, who must perpetuate themselves as best they ca...

Industrial cultures package and process their food in a similar way, so that it often appears synthetic. In these conditions, verse often lingers in a minor role, more or less on a par with pets and house plants. Linguistic expertise may flourish, but knowing - or the kind of knowing that poetry is - flees to the interstices and edges of such cultures, where other undomesticated creatures are also to be found. Motion, in cultures of the machine, tends to become an end in itself, and it is rarely to the tune of being. in these conditions, poetry hides.