The app for independent voices
If you find it hard to enjoy poetry, here’s a thought that can help.
Assume there’s nothing there for you to understand.
The poem is not an act of communication. Instead, it is an act of prompting. The poet is approaching you as a language model, supplying a series of prompts that you’re supposed to run in your head—and it’s the thing that happens inside you that matters.
Poems are, in this way, more closely related to the jhanas than to blog posts.
Skimming a poem, saying, “I don’t get it”, is like reading the instructions to a meditation technique, saying, “Its just a bunch of stuff about lovingkindness and noticing the tickling sensation in my hands, I don’t get why people are so excited about it.”
Try following the instructions?
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Another metaphor: reading poems is like having sex. You don’t have sex because you are trying to achieve something (fotnot: well, sometimes). There is no lesson that awaits you at the end. You do it because losing yourself in the pleasure of being an animal body together with someone else is a singular and exciting experience (if you are into that sort of thing). Poems, like sex, like meditation, like music, like art, is an explosion of presence—a visceral, odd, and emotionally intriguing flavors of presence.
And then? The experience is gone, and the day resumes.
Poems can be messages about love or death or the wrongness of war, too. I’m not denying that. They can be acts of communication. They can teach lessons.
But among poets, it is common to see the messages that are sometimes communicated as secondary. It is the prompting stuff (the stuff that can’t be summarized or paraphrased but has to be experienced) that makes poetry poetry. Much like the thing that makes music music isn't the fact that you can use it to sell Coca Cola. It is the strange way that sound waves can evoke feelings that makes music music.
Those who are really hardcore go all in on that and drop the idea of communication fully. Osip Mandelstam, for instance:
In poetry only the executory understanding has any importance, and not the passive, the reproducing, the paraphrasing understanding.
“Executory understanding”, that is, the understanding you get from executing the poem, like a computer program, in your head.
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What running a poem-prompt in the head looks like for me:
Take a poem, whatever you feel like—but preferably something compact and low-communicative like John Ashbury’s “Vetiver“ (poetryfoundation.org/po…) or Louise Glück’s “Aboriginal Landscape"(poetryfoundation.org/po…).
Set off a lavish amount of uninterrupted time. Again, the poem is a prompt. As with language models—the longer you run it, the better the output gets.
Read the first line.
Stop.
What do the words evoke in you? Not “what do they mean” but “what do the words output in you if you run the prompt”. Fill the words with images drawn from your experience. Meditate on those images, think about them.
Do not move on until the first line has blossomed into a rich cognitive state—a rich tapestry of images, thoughts, feelings. (It is ok to read commentary or talk with a friend or ask ChatGPT for reflections if you struggle to get the line to open up. Whatever unpacks it.)
Once you have generated a state, you can go on to the next line(s).
How does what you read next impact the structure of thought that was taking shape in your head while reading the previous line? Does it fit with the thoughts you were having, or does it unsettle the landscape you summoned? (Good poems surprise you.)
It is like impro theater. You thought something, and then the poem replied. Perhaps it didn’t say what you expected? Now, you have to think on your feet and reorganize the structure of meaning in your head to integrate what the poem is throwing at you. You have to accept everything, you have to say, “Yes, and”, then roll with it.
Again, this is all pointless—like sex. But keep going. It can be fun.
Go line by line, until, 90 minutes later, you have read one page.
There are so many rich and surprising experiences that we can reach by moving our minds in odd ways. The great poems is a collection of prompts to produce such states.
