every voyage into the mountains will furnish the answer

Song and story, like music, dance and painting, are separate though related. They are sisters, the Greeks said; daughters of one mother, whose name is Mnemosyne: memory, minding, the mind. Their father is the weather. Story and song, in other words, are daughters of knowing, playing at taking their mother's place. Their dwelling, like their mother's - every language seems to know this - is the mountains. 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 post a question: How can the home of knowing by where human organization has not reached? But every voyage into the mountains will furnish the answer: it cannot be anywhere else.

- Robert Bringhurst, from his essay "Everywhere Being is Dancing, Knowing is Known" in Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays & Interviews (Quarry Press, 1995). 

you give yourself away

Some people are led to the writing of poetry - or to painting, dance or music - on the promise that it will allow them to "express themselves." Insofar as you are a part of the older, richer, larger and more knowledgeable whole we call the world, and insofar as you are a student or apprentice of that world, expressing yourself may be worth the time and trouble. But if it is really only your self that you are interested in, I venture to think that performing someone else's poem - reciting it or reading it aloud - is likely better medicine that writing. Poetry, like science, is a way of finding out - by trying to state perceptively and clearly - what exists and what is going on. That is too much for the self to handle. That is why, when you go to work for the poem, you give yourself away. Composing a poem is a way of leaving the self behind and getting involved in something larger.

 

- Robert Bringhurst, from his lecture "Poetry and Thinking," delivered to Luther College, University of Regina in 2001 and published in Thinking and Singing: Poetry & the Practice of Philosophy (ed. Tim Lilburn, Cormorant Books, 2002).

all they mean by poetry is poems

Herakleitos - evidently the earliest prose poet whose work survives - says... "All things think and are linked together by thinking." Parmenides answers to him in verse: "To be and to have meaning are the same." These are concise definitions of poetry and brief explanations of how it has come to exist. Poetry is not manmade; it is not pretty words; it is not something hybridized by humans on the farm of human language. Poetry is a quality or aspect of existence. It is the thinking of things.

Language is one of the methods we use to mime and to mirror and admire it, and for that reason poetry, as mirrored in human language, has come to be taught in the English Department. They know at least as much about poetry in the Physics and Biology departments, and in the Mathematics and Music departments, but there they always call it by different names. If they are really old-fashioned, they might even call it Truth or Beauty. If they are really up to date, they will never use such words, and the silence they put in their place is the name they use for poetry. Those who are really up to date in the English Department now and then still mention poetry. But all they mean by poetry is poems. Poems are the tip of the iceberg afloat on the ocean of poetry.

...

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If someone hears you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

Simone Weil wrote something once in her notebook about the purpose of works of art, and the purpose of words: "Their function is to testify, after the fashion of blossoming apple trees and stars." When words do what blossoming apple trees do, and what stars do, poetry is what you read and hear.

 

- Robert Bringhurst, from his lecture "Poetry and Thinking," delivered to Luther College, University of Regina in 2001 and published in Thinking and Singing: Poetry & the Practice of Philosophy (ed. Tim Lilburn, Cormorant Books, 2002).

the enchanted forest is really a forest

Rhyme and meter are natural features of language. But of course in natural speech the rhymes are mostly imperfect, and they occur at irregular intervals. And in natural speech the meter keeps varying too, like the grain of wood or the texture of a forest. That’s the kind of rhyme and meter that appeals to me most. The enchanted forest is really a forest; it isn’t an orchard.

- Robert Bringhurst, in conversation with Evan Jones over at The Manchester Review. You can read the whole thing here.

poetry is the main way of trying to tell the truth

In most oral societies, literature is the major art form, and the main genre in oral literature isn’t the novel, it’s mythtelling. Myths are conveyed through narrative poetry. So in oral cultures, by and large, poetry is the main way of trying to tell the truth. That, in a nutshell, is the history of poetry and truth for the first nine tenths of human existence. Then you start to get literacy. Then pretty soon you get prose and mathematics. You start to get experimental science. You get historical, philosophical, epistolary, and scientific writing. Later still you get prose fiction. Now you have lots of ways of trying to tell the truth – and lots of ways of trying not to – so different truths get told. A lot of humans get more interested in themselves than they are in the larger world. This isn’t just a literary phenomenon, of course. Urbanization, central heating, fossil fuel, and the electrical grid have a lot to do with it too. Print and broadcast journalism accelerate it. The internet sets it ablaze. People find themselves living in a sea of human voices, most of them talking of small-time human concerns. Human truth – heavily laced with human falsehood – obscures all other truth, and poetry suffers, like everything else, in these conditions.

- Robert Bringhurst, in conversation with Evan Jones over at The Manchester Review. You can read the whole thing here.