| I was writing up my Poem of the Month, and as so often happens, the poem, because it is talismanic, pushes out the mind, like a boat pushed out from the harbour, so that the safe Sunday night place, (where I am now), disappears, and before me is the sea.
Poems push us away from what we know into what we try our best not to know.
Everyday life is a genial deception. We have to get on, get through, get sorted, get done, and in order for all that perfectly normal, perfectly necessary stuff to happen, we keep tight to the shoreline of existence,
This is not a criticism of life's shoreline. I love it like you do, and recognise its rights and pleasures. But I know it is not everything. And I know that what else there is needs courage.
A poem is an act of courage. When committed to paper, it is a deed, not a thought, and the deed, witnessed by us, becomes part of our inheritance.
We inherit poems by reading them. We can have as much of this estate as we want. But it is a dreamer's estate; unrealisable, untradeable, unsellable.
Poems are the inheritance of the youngest son or daughter. Poems are not mansions or stock options; they are nothing solid at all. They are energy. They are the mimic of the dynamic universe. They are prompters, moments of change, constellations of possibility.
Why do I call poetry a mimic of the dynamic universe?
We have learned to believe in parallel worlds. We seldom recognise them, but we accept that they exist. At every interval, the world divides. In our bodies, weighted to our one life, we make certain choices and follow certain paths, but even the dullest of us sometimes know that another path lies beside ours. We can't take it - that is, we choose not to - but it is there.
The poem, like the universe, is by nature, multiple choice. The poem is not locked in time, nor must it obey time's rules. The poem is one and many. It is what it is, faithful to itself, but not bound by any outside force. It frees us because it is itself free. It pushes us offshore, because its home is movement.
Take a poem - a real one, not doggerel or therapy, and in its wide spaces are the lands unclaimed by speculators and pragmatists alike. The poem belongs to no one, but it can be yours, if you are like- minded of its inheritance.
Which takes a certain risk and courage too - and that is the beginning of your love affair with the poem.
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