On the poem

I saw a note (I’m not sure who posted it, as I was mindlessly scrolling and only realized I had a thought about it after it was already gone - my apologies) asking whether a poem needs to be written by the head or the heart. I thought about this a bit and distilled the question further to “should a poem be more emotion or logic?” Is it more important that one is left feeling something or thinking something after reading a poem.

Poetry as a vehicle for emotion

Poetry has long been used to capture formless emotion. As Shakespeare said, “And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”

The poet’s job is to trap the ethereal in ink. Lyrical poetry has likely existed as long as spoken language. It is still produced with greater commercial success than any other form of poetry, now they’re just set to background music. We, aptly, call these modern poets ‘lyricists’ and follow them through every genre. Just like the poets of old, these modern lyricists capture our hearts young and their poetry seems to embody a certain feeling at a certain time. What about the rest of us, then, who don’t have the voice or the gentle strumming of a guitar behind us? Yes, we could just use a beat machine and become a SoundCloud rapper. But some of us choose to stick to the page instead.

Poetry as a means of analyzing emotion.

T.S. Eliot ushered in the Modernist movement of poetry. It was obscure and wordy. It was weird. It was fucking amazing. William Carlos Williams famously stated in his autobiography “Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of escape,” and even spoke about needing to avoid reading Eliot’s work because it would slowly infect the way he wrote. His beef was that Eliot’s work led people away from direct and accessible interpretation. It required heavier lifting on the part of the reader. But still, there was something about it that excited other poets. Eliot was your favorite poet’s favorite poet. Maybe it was 1922’s The Waste Land by Eliot that led to Williams’ now timeless "The Red Wheelbarrow” in 1923.

These poems, and many that followed their lead, are great because they demand close reading. They are not emotions as much as they are the aftereffects of emotions. They are words of someone halfway through reasoning out their feelings for themselves. And you, the reader, are left to finish the task. This leads to a cognitive interaction with the emotion that, for my money, is so much more meaningful.

Head or heart?

It’s a false choice. It’s both. Anyone who’s seen a mental health specialist knows that they tell you to do two things: 1) allow yourself to feel the emotion first, give it its space and give yourself the respect to have the emotion without thinking about it then 2) think about that shit a lot to see what the feeling was tied to, what might have contributed to it and what it might be your mind/body telling you about your world. That’s what a good poem demands of you. Read it. Feel it. But be a bit unsure. Explore the feeling. Explore the words. Make meaning of it. Give it some music.