Poetry is typically short (a godsend in an ever more rapid world), open to expressive interpretation and most importantly our mental experience of life is poetry. This last point is the least often told but the most fundamental. People wonder at the discontinuity of a dream, scratch together memories of a past trauma or love – when they do, it is poetry. Jerry Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) or thought ordered mental expression (TOME) – when written out plain or painstakingly accurate is the mentalese of poetry. Poetry appeals to the reader/listener as experience – sometimes touching, disturbing or emotional – it speaks to our thoughts, experience and creativity. The brain spontaneously creates reality as poetry.

...What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

We do this reading poetry. It is what makes it so appealing.

Used to write something like poetry. Still enjoy reading it. Verse allows us to wander into the abstract recesses of consciousness. 'Real' or hallucinatory. It permits us to rest some of our more tedious cognitive processes, while restoring serenity and wonder. A brother writes poetry now. His imagery reflects a life well-lived and a comfort in his own skin. The images are not readily accessible to everyone. And that is all right, too. He still asks questions, going in to his eighth decade. Not bad, for an old guy....a grandfather, after all these years.

Although poetry differs from prose in that the range of interpretive possibilities is not constrained by concision-design semiologically, it nonetheless retains a prosaic function by unstable reference to given classes of such possibilities. This is why, in my view, poets historically can get away with criticizing tyrants while political opponents can't, which I interpret as indicated in Shakespeare's Hamlet when he writes "the play's the thing..." Consider for example, for what edification it's worth, the poem below composed for the occasion:

Where seed of wit with sprout of hope,
begrudge not frosted lens of scope,
when fog and mist and dew drops too,
allow no dart of vision through,
where sap and thorns with bile discourage,
the dance of neuron left to forage,
still yet the sapling's ken to procure,
ideation, construal, slink past the obscure.

Nice work!

I think, if poetry is as impenetrable as some would make it out to be, we are become more literal than is good for us. Obscurity may well be the stuff of dreams and creativity. And, so, if said impenetrability is a bane to the understanding of poetry, what of art? As a personal observation, if poetry does not for me fire a neuron or nudge a ventricle, I will put it aside for a bit. Reflective cognition is superior to fatalistic resignation. Should the verse not come more clearly on second reading, then, and only then,I will throw in the towel.

Oh, and please mention something about the intentional (rather artful) application of silence. That dark and deep and incredibly powerful energetic absence. No, you didn't need to say anything at all. I got the message. Shut up. Sit down. Just who do you think you are? Something that matters?

I would love to hear about the poetic language of absence, that deliberate manufacturing of desire (desperation, starvation) in one's audience. We children will do anything for a little trickle of energetic attention from those perceived as above us, our influencers...

Poets are usually humble, but poets are not in power...at least not visibly and explicitly in power...

Although in reality, they are the unacknowledged legislators...

And since this discussion of poetry is in the context of philosophy, Ms. Gluck must talk about Rumi. He was, after all, first a teacher (an Islamic scholar, trained in geometry), and only later became a poet and a highly mystical one. He made a friend, and this friend lit him up. Shams-e Tabrizi caused him to see things differently, and Rumi wrote poems expressing deep affection for this friend.

This transformation reveals two sorts of teachers and two sorts of teaching experiences. One is rather sober, formal, and crunchy, and the other is ecstatic, informal, and soft/loving. In others words, in Rumi and his life, just like with Socrates and his life, we see the relational aspects of philosophy--the lover and the beloved, the teacher and the pupil.

We moderns kept only the first teacher--via Plato. We have the symbolic part down. We are way crunchy. We KNOW things.

But the latter teacher and the latter pupil...we do not discuss. Fine. Perhaps it's a private matter. (This lovely silence, this lovely private matter.) It's uncomfortable for men especially, since it involves honesty about the complexity of love/gender and the realm of ideas, it involves opening up and being vulnerable to another (most often another another man/youth), and it involves unity...a very touchy subject when it comes to relations between adults and youths and unity between them...

We are modern humans, and modern humans are prudes, hence the collective silence on the obvious facts of life, the reality of this ancient connection...

However, poetry gives us a language to "go there" without going there explicitly and getting everyone all a flutter. We don't have to expose our private matters, for all to analyze and fight over.

Here is the silence I would love hear Ms. Gluck play with a little in words....

Philosophy, poetry, and adult/youth bonds...and our collective silence on the subject, for very good reasons...

Yes, I expected a very pregnant pause here.....

I won't revisit any of my lost poet's inclinations, so this comment entry will not pretend to be profound.. It is more a fond memory. From high school. There were two upperclassmen who vied for class clown honors. A requirement said that poetry was a subtopic of grade twelve English. Some teachers felt this entailed writing poetry. Class clown A. wrote: hoyday, hoyday, befou, hoyday. When the English teacher asked what does this mean?, the author allegedly responded: to the best of my knowledge, nothing. Clown B wrote: there was a bush, there, there.. I did not hear of any inquiry or rejoinder for that effort. One man was gruesomely tortured and died in Vietnam. As far as is known.
I don't know whether the other poet died in like manner, or if he is alive and well in Sydney---that would be good.. I have another friend in Australia.. He is Canadian and was not compelled to decide among war, death and poetry.

During times of existential crisis and in places where homelessness has been normalized, even here in the wealthiest and most wealth-stratified nation in quantified human his\herstory we find poetry being grasped nearly as tightly as bread and water. We can thank also that once taboo genre that developed from reactionary rap into circumspect hip-hop for much of the movement of poetry and other forms of the Humanities\Letters that have migrated from silo'd academic campuses out to the streets, neighborhood venue Poetry Slams and alter-Native media platforms. Shout out to early pioneer Jayne Cortez and her creative collaborators & family in her ensemble named Firespitters and of more recent vintage Gil Scott-Heron and Saul Williams. Zimmy Dylan surely helped nudge the Beats onto Main Street from his roots on the Iron Range to his travels to Boho caves of Gotham City and the Empire State(s). Keep on doing as PT seems to have survived departure of blessed founding philosophers and similarly evolved and become ever more accessible.

"Like a slave in orbit\Who is beaten til he's tamed
All for a moment's glory\And it's a dirty rotten shame..."

Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List and Looksee

Jayne Cortez and the firespitters - I've been searching
YouTube collage of clips curated by Aviva Gabriel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTX9XbQ8Evc&list=PLD9F82D0A60F95BDE

Jayne Cortez and the firespitters - I've been searching
from the album Taking the blues back home (1996)
Play

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