Poetry as a Spoken Language

 

A childhood friend sent me a long email. It was almost 4 pages long and full of thoughtful lines from a man who now has time to think about life’s lessons.

“This is like writing a letter,” I replied, “you remember the days when a fountain pen used to glide on virgin paper?”

“I still have my fountain pen, but if I use it again, it will make arabesques rather than glide” was his response.

And then, a memory came back to him.

“Talking about arabesque, you remember the Lebanese poet Mikhail Naimy and his works we read in high school? He actually had written a multi-page letter to his friend that ended by something like “I am sorry to write you so long – I did not have enough time to write only one page.”

Ha! I had forgotten all about that. Perhaps that is what you and I have been pursuing all our lives – the art of distilling ourselves to our essence.”

… We were two young men all around us believed that we would dedicate our lives to the arts. As there is never a strait road around any bend, we ended up in the scientific world but always kept our secret gardens for the arts. I believe science loses its artfulness without music and poetry.

So, I thought about that line from Naimy.  The immediate analogy for science might be Ockham’s razor that states “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best.” And as a photographer, my strict adherence to Black & White film photography seems to encapsulate my outlook to simplicity in dealing with the challenge of telling a complex story.

As for poetry, the choices are infinite. First there is form of expression, or even the architecture of delivery. Japanese Haiku and Latvian Daina (along with traditional Lithuanian and Estonian poetry) come to mind. Indeed completing and sharing a thought, a feeling or a fantasy in very few lines or even words is much more difficult than writing a sonnet. The Haiku aims to express a full thought in 4 lines, and the Daina, using a repetitive meter (called trochaic), uses different syllables in a strict arrangement of succession.

Then there is the imagery, be that through musical notes, instruments and composition, or through words. While all expression is based on the author’s experience or intuition, they have to be panhuman to speak to the listening audience or reader. Personally, I have shed more tears and often skipped a heartbeat listening to string instruments than any other musical instrument. But hearing Jacqueline Du Pré play F on the D string always reminded me that the genius of the cellist is what touches us, not the composition or the cello itself, even if it was a Stradivarius.

So, in poetry as well, mastery of the language, like playing a cello, is not what touches the audience. Rather, it is the moment of intuition by the poet that leads to the discovery of a new meaning in and for a known word. Within a known feeling. In a known tragedy.

So, I played a game with the moment. I challenged myself to recall two sentences, from poems I had read more than once, where the most was said with the least words and that after each read over passing times, I had still identified with the message, imagery and intuition of the authors.

With little digging into my memory, lines from Neruda and Alda Merini popped up.

Here they are:

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

I have often written about the work of Pablo Neruda. His life and his sometimes bucolic imagery seem to immediately find a context where his poetry rests, without regret and without fanfare. Every word in this one-liner says something, almost without needing the other words to make the point. And the reader shuts his eyes, thinking about all the times he or she did not have the opportunity to say this line with such simplicity. Or to ever had the moment to say it.

Alda Merini is an Italian poet who also had a tumultuous personal life.  Mental and psychological maladies made her family, social and personal moments a struggle all reflected in her writings. She is up-to-the point, like Neruda, but somber and injured.

“Ho Bisogno di Sentimenti” is my favorite poem of hers, where an entire existence full of pain and disappointment is distilled. I need feelings, she writes, three words that encapsulate all that she had missed in life.

The first few lines of that poem set the tone:

I do not need money.

I need feelings,

words, words wisely chosen,

flowers called thoughts,

roses called presences,

dreams that inhabit the trees

 songs that make statues dance,

stars that murmur in lovers' ears.

 

And, in the last two lines, she describes her needs in the cloak of poetry:

I need poetry,

this magic that burns away the heaviness of words,

That awakens emotions and gives new colors

 

While the translation provides the guidance to a reader who does not read Italian, I think the beauty of these lines is best found in the melody of la bella lingua:

Ho bisogno di poesia,

questa magia che brucia la pesantezza delle parole,

che risveglia le emozioni e dà colori nuovi.

 

The lines from Neruda and Merini made me think about a painting by Jules-Claude Ziegler (circa 1852) of the Greek beauty Lais of Corinth now at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. It is a work on oil and canvas, but the moment it captures is ethereal, where Apelles is conversing with Lais in the shade of trees, above a water fountain.

I have always liked this painting for the genius of Ziegler, but today I wonder what Apelles was telling to Lais to make her so secretively pleased.

The garden is not of cherry trees and it does not seem to be springtime, but could Apelles be reciting the lines by Neruda?

 

… Then, I emailed those lines to my friend.

 

 

April 27, 2025

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025