A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (2)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

Poetry, in my experience, is written in a moment of numinosity. True poems, real poems, are easy to recognize. My test of poetry has always been that when hearing or reading someone else’s poems, am I moved to want to write a poem of my own? If I am, then the poem is a source of inspiration for me. Inspiration means that the poem is inspiring, it breathes Spirit into the reader. The experience of writing poems is life affirming and it is always exciting to begin writing a new poem. Of course, it is a subjective test, but poems can always be analysed objectively and a critical and intellectual criticism of the poem formulated later.
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What is the nature of writing poetry? For me, writing poetry has always been a way to find order and understanding in my life, a life that was not empowered and that was sometimes dis-spirited. I discovered that writing poems empowered me, returned me to Spirit, and gave me an experience that I have not been able to find in any other activity.
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“Inspired” writing seems to have no ego involved in the writing and afterwards there is no ego-attachment to what has been written. This is writing from Spirit; the writing feels as though it has been dictated and this in no way denigrates the writer’s talent or hard work to produce a written text. Spirit communicates to us in our dreams and in shamanic journeys; writing poems also opens the door to Spirit.
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When I was in university I read Isak Dinesen’s short story, “Sorrow Acre.” This story opened to me the mythological dimension of literature. It gave me an approach to textual explication, literary criticism, and understanding literature. I remember being touched very deeply by the experience of reading this story. It was an epiphanous experience, just as years before reading Steinbeck influenced me in a similar way. I also read the work of many poets, including William Blake and Walt Whitman; however, it was in reading Isak Dinesen’s “Sorrow Acre”—then learning about the Garden Myth and mythology as psychological truth—that I learned my critical approach to literature.
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When I read Allen Ginsberg’s statement, in a newspaper article in 1967—“Scribble down your nakedness because it is the nakedness of the soul that people are really interested in”—I knew that this was my ars poetica and is basic to all of the poems I have written.
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One of the first long poems I wrote (I was about eighteen years old) is entitled “Tumour City,” and it is about my stepfather’s long illness. I began my writing career as a confessional poet, a poet of truth and revelation; my earliest poems were poems of witness, and I have always had a deep commitment to exploring the inner psychological being. The aim of the contemporary poet, in my opinion, is to write a poetry of witness, which includes catharsis, healing, and redemption; the aim is the diminishment of the ego, not its enlargement.
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