"If You Can't be a Poet, be the Poem"

It may be true that if one can walk, one can dance. Yet if one can write would poetry assurantly, or assonantly follow?

In 1991 I read Diane Ackerman’s ode to life gracefully organized in a book entitled “A Natural History of the Senses”. It is a masterful work where science and poetry found both their harmony and a continuum. The style is voluptuous and to celebrate our gift to smell, taste, touch, hear and see. Diane Ackerman as a naturalist, poet, explorer and pilot is as eclectic as the topic of this book. My intent is not to discuss the book, as there are volumes about it in the literature and on the Internet. Instead, it is to revisit the role of poetry we all knowingly or unconsciously allow to influence our daily lives.

… So, I reread Ackerman’s book. Why? Because of a serendipitous comment a friend made about those who want to learn about our surrounding world. “Remember the Kung Fu series of the early 1970s? David Carradine played the half-Chinese, half-white Shaolin monk.  He was being trained to see the world his eyes closed, and hear, smell and touch to appreciate all that surrounded him. He was called “Grasshopper” by his Master, and sometimes I see that “Grasshopper” in you.”

Now, I had to do a search about the Kong Fu series as I had watched it only intermittently (when there was electricity) during the Lebanese civil war almost 40 years ago. I also read the biography of Carradine, his constant search for love and thrill, and I found an intriguing statement, which I used as the title of this essay, attributed to him.

… What does it mean to “be the poem”? I did not find his suggestion eccentric or capricious. I know what he means: the poem is how one structures his moments so others can see an escape in what he/she does or, they remember when they had done so as well. The “poem” is the common language where people’s desires, hopes and memories find the simplicity of sharing and celebrating. More, the poem is a synthesis of all our senses, but used somewhat differently than their routine roles: a poem is not what we see but how we see it. It is that personal yet widely observed angle to the ordinary where others also find refuge. A poem is not what we taste, but why we trust our taste buds to remind others about the importance of not being alone. And, a poem is that morning coffee we make when it is raining outside: the welcoming of another day of discovery is then filled with aroma, sound, fear and joy.

Being the poem is what turns the passage into a voyage that lasts as long as we last. And then it tells a story to those who are planning that journey on their own.

In fact, that is how Diane Ackerman ends her book. Here is that delightful passage:

“It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”

… I always lived through my senses. I cook with my nose (it is ready when the aroma is right), I taste wine with my eyes first, and the tremor of a body is best experienced through a smile and a whisper before a touch. So is the case with words and the sharing of what we have found (or missed) during our journey through that flat emotional terrain. 

Eventually being the poem is celebrating that simple language that has no alphabet, no geography and no cultural history. Except perhaps the story of what we all do, have done, want to do, or are too self-conscious to share. In its simplest form, being the poem is cooking with the nose and surprising everyone when the dish comes out perfectly cooked!! 

Distilled to its essence, being the poem, is purely being -- and I have learned to be though my senses, on that mysterious path Ackerman describes. A path where science and logic got orphaned because they hoped to answer the "Why".

Being the poem is learning to leave the poet smoke his pipe looking at an empty page.

Note: I took this picture during my morning coffee in Bellagio, Lake Cuomo, Italy.

PS/ David Carradine died in Bangkok on June 3, 2009 from a fatal autoerotic asphyxiation accident.

August 15, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015