“Approach it as art. Paint it. Film it. What is trying to come out of you? Seek the form it requires. You can transform the space as you like. The words will transform you.”
Who is writing whom is the question I am most interested in. If we set up the parameters for magic, with intent, cleansing, protection, have our anchors & guides to call on and choose to enter other postcodes of consciousness, then I cannot say for sure where the poetry is coming from. I mean can anyone really? Even if we are not practicing conscious magic, it still comes from a place of in-betweens.
You can channel or you can not, either way you are channelling. With your rituals, your personal ceremonies, surrounded by talisman, charm & totem. The word ‘poet,’ in itself doesn’t even need to exist. Seer. Ritual Leader. Magician. Witch. Shaman. Magus. Those are the spaces, ‘poetry,’ emerges from. As a language, as utterance, as emanation, as divination, as spell, as power, as power, as power.
Who wields this power? Is it you? Or are you being wielded? How do we come into our ‘isness’; our authentic seer, how to tap into the consciousness which connects. Connects through energy. Utterance-energy. What was your intention when you wrote /vocalised/ constructed this poem/utterance/object? Where did you have to journey to come back with this artefact – this poemtterance.
No but srsly. How do You/I write a poem?
But this is serious. More serious than ever before. Can we continue to rely on current definitions of life? Now is the future you thought would happen to another you. Now. It is not going to happen, anymore. Baudrillard. A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction. ( L’illusion de la fin : ou La greve des evenements)
Approach it as art. Paint it. Film it. What is trying to come out of you? Seek the form it requires. You can transform the space as you like. The words will transform you. The energy of the words will transform in some way, every person who interacts with your Poem-utterance. Maybe heal? The transformation could be to heal. I certainly have experienced the healing effects on myself, on others.
Or is it an exorcism? What are we exorcising and how do we find the language to do so. Sometimes, I score poems like music. Where music is vibration & frequency. How do we hit that frequency? Create that vibration.
In the rich literary tradition of the Subcontinent haal is a word that has been used to describe the ‘state of writing,’ or the state that you need to enter in order to write. There are some tangible connections between flamenco & Kathak and that state of duende for the dancer talked of extensively by Lorca in connection to poetry is equally important to the classical artists of the Subcontinent, be they dhrupad singers or dancers. I like to add to this MA space as well, deep at the core of the Japanese aesthetic – the in-between space, that space between spaces – the space of the Butoh dancer.
Perhaps that is how I write a poem, by slipping into that in-between space, scoring the elements as they emerge, finding my voice, stamping my feet on the ground to wake the dead while dipping into the deep well of my own resources – be they as they may. Bloody, bruised, battered and all.
How do I write a poem? How do You write a poem, where I am YOU & YOU are I & Thou Art That.