Sort Of A Mission Statement

A legitimate aim of poetry: the attempted communication of wisdom.

Having wisdom to attempt communicating does not imply that one is wise, as I use the terms. I could be content with the modified Socratic claim that no one is wise. I could add that being wise is but an ideal which animates humankind—a sun and center of our revolutions.

But didacticism is dead, it is said. Poems should be embodiments; they should show but not tell. Keep your wisdom to yourself. I'm big enough to breathe my own ideas and draw from them my own conclusions.

Well. I enjoy vignettes and sometimes whole stories. But life is already made of them. I want something made of it. Even good storytelling—effective prose with an eye on and ear to the panoply of events, cleverly edited—is still just that. That's not to denigrate. Call it a view of narrative modesty.

Let me backpedal. Let's suppose that some stories are more than stories in the modest sense (and perhaps their component images more than mere images, their narrative arcs and twists more than themselves, and so on). That is, suppose a story manages to make something of itself; somehow to establish its own relevance and I'm not left having to rescue it armed only with my affection. Insofar as someone has achieved this meta-narrative magic in a piece of narrative writing by deliberate craft, I cherish it. Cherishability is something I look for in a poem. (Don't mistake this. There are disturbing poems I cherish, and churlish ones, and ones close to coloring outside the lines of decipherability.)

But here is my complaint. 'Embodiment' is a term too easy to satisfy. What if a poet is no more than showing me, cleverly and with some fascination, some piece of his or her life, real or imagined? Maybe you balk: Isn't that enough? No, not for me. If it is for you, fabulous. But I'm looking for something else and not afraid to be writing for those looking for the same something else.

'Wisdom poetry' is a term I would never use in a context where I couldn't caveat and disclaim. But it is something I encounter too little of, and something whose very idea is too often dismissed as so much pedantry, as if to say: because there have been pedants, let's do everything unconsciously—where pedants have no air—and collect the surface lilies from the pond. OK, let's. But let's have other aims, too: let's not limit poetry to the vignette, the story and the unconscious accident/providential stroke.

Poetry could and should be Big Tent.