poet | artist

What’s there before a poem is? A sunlit hummingbird, a building with gravel along its foundation, a sound of helicopter, a canteen of water. We can say so many words, and they are just words. But when the poem is there, we are speaking a divine handprint. Or sweating it out, like a planetary fever.

Needing inspiration yesterday, we went to the New York City Poetry Festival and listened to poetries spoken under plane trees in the planet’s hottest-July-ever’s heat. The Poetry Society of New York always has a sweet area for kids, where they can sit on blankets and paint pictures or write poems of their own, so that’s where my daughter always goes: her poet-soul keeps sweeping her back to her tween self.

I’m happy about that. Because, me too. Last year, we heard poet Malvika Jolly introduce a group reading, but her work overshadowed everything else.

I was also really happy this year to see some familiar independent presses with tables for the first time at the festival. Like Wave Books, where I picked up a copy of Dorothea Lasky’s book of lectures, Animal, and immediately started to read her essay on color in poetry.

Think right now of the last time you read a poem with the perfect color. What color was it? Was it an obvious one? A blue sky, a green tree, a red rose, a yellow sun? Did it symbolize something: a black door, a white dress? How did the expected or unexpected color put spirit in the poem. Was the sun violet? We all need to know about the violet sun. Questions about colors are good questions to ask ourselves.

Dorothea Lasky, from ” What Is Color in Poetry or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word”

She talks about color and meaning-making, also about poetry and dream-reality connectivity. She declares “color is not simply a decorative element in a poem. Color makes an expanse—a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination—a poem. Color makes this space bigger, this imaginative space more specific and bigger, and gives it weight. Color makes this expanse—a colorless idea—into something solid.”

Here’s an example she gives:

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
by Wallace Stevens

The houses were haunted 
By white night-gowns.
None are green, 
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings,
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

Which is really a commentary on the “colorless reality” we largely live in, that leads to colorless dreams, and therefore more colorless, lifeless reality. You are about to argue, saying our brave new world is full of color. But then I will have to say, remember that almost every drop of it is advertisement or propaganda. A lot of color is bought and sold—stripped of meaning.

Lasky reflects on Goethe’s and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on color, namely the way human imagination contains a dormant light that can come alive.

In darkness we can, by an effort of imagination, call up the brightest images; in dreams objects appear to us as in broad daylight…

Goethe, “Theory of Colours”

256. To be able generally to name a colour, is not the same as being able to copy it exactly. I can perhaps say “There I see a reddish place” and yet I can’t mix a colour that I recognize as being exactly the same.

257. Try, for example, to paint what you see when you close your eyes! And yet you can roughly describe it.

Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Colour”

Lasky remarks, “they are exciting ideas to consider. Maybe the purpose of poems is also to reconnect the real and dream worlds, to light our dormant lights to describe the infinite colors that are impossible to perfectly recreate in the natural world. Maybe that is somehow the point and the purpose of being a poet, to describe what can’t ever be again.”

I find it exciting because I find myself working in both aspects of color: poet and painter. Pigments often disappoint my vision for a watercolor piece, and poetry’s reliance on the vocabulary of my language is sometimes as constricting as a sweaty blouse. But given the constraints, we pull ourselves forward by pushing against them.

What’s there before the poem? Obviously, the spirit, mind, heart, and body. Last week at my job, another writer described poetry as merely flowery words, as opposed to being an act of thinking. I deleted that sentence from our presentation so we wouldn’t sound like idiots, but it made me wonder how widespread that idea is. Poetry is made of thoughts that harness the entirety of our living experience. Life. That’s what’s there.

---

Who is singing? In color?

This week, on hearing that the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor had died, I went to listen again to the first punk-pop CD I ever bought, her album “I do not want what I have not got.” And there were gems of prescient wisdom, like how wisdom can sometimes sound like meanness. Or how our civilization deceives itself and enacts cycles of nakedly self-defeating hubris.

It reminded me a little bit of Dorothea Lasky’s wild poetry readings, full of scintillating L-I-F-E, with the stuff of our civilization trying to ride it into the inferno.

Maybe I’m also trying to explain why we didn’t go see the Barbie movie this weekend. Well, “whatever these pink things mean” (from Plath’s “Fever 103”) we are alive and suffering and finding hope in sunrises, even if they are discolored by wildfire smoke. Even if it is hotter than we’ve ever seen it and getting even hotter.