An essential motivation in the act of writing poetry is to say something in a way that prose can not. [Just as "cannot" does not express emphasis in quite the way "can not" does.] Another motivation is to say something, but not always.
We often confuse novelty with progress, much to our peril.--Roy Cropper
Because meaning can cease to penetrate if it is not expressed in inventive ways, poetry has a power that prose does not. Human brains acknowledge familiarity of phrasing, register the prior-reasoned meaning, and move on. We make assumptions about what we already know to save time. If confronted with innovations with language, the brain's tendency is to slow down, reason through things anew, perhaps coming to new realizations or even new conclusions. Or reject it as strange, meaningless or threatening. That is the challenge and the risk of poetry.
I once read that we only actually hear a song once. The second and subsequent hearings are infused with our first memory of hearing it, and because of the psychic noise of memory, it is impossible for us to be truly present to hear it again. I believe that you can train yourself to be more present to every hearing, as a visual artist can train her/his attention to the act of seeing. So the artist is working from the vision of a subject, instead of the idea of it. But perhaps once the first hearing or sight of something is the most sense-oriented.
(Picasso) has that
strange quality of an earth that one has never seen...--Gertrude Stein
I am re-reading Bram Stoker's Dracula--for about the fifth time. And this time, it seems really funny, which is a reaction I have never had with it. It seems like a satire on British impassivity and devotion to duty. Jonathan Harker is confronted with whole villages of people begging him not to go to the Count's castle. They are yelling: Devil, Satan, Evil, etc. Getting down on their hands and knees, clutching their crucifixes and asking him for the sake of his mother not to go. And his response is slight curiosity and then back to business. It seems really comical.
And this led me to realize, how far away I am from reading it as one would have when it was published: when western Europe and the Americas knew very little to nothing about vampires; how intriguing and suspenseful reading the description of Harker's journey must have been to them; and how I never got to have that experience. Vampires were a part of popular culture when I was little. I watched Abbott and Costelle Meet Frankenstein when I was four. I ate Count Chocula cereal, etc.
