SATURDAY POETRY

WHO IS POET?

the one who
bathes in the poem
in the sea

©2012-2013 Who Is Poet? stephanie pope
Monsters and Bugs Poetry Series
mythopoetry.com, publisher


________________________notes

In the story of the birth of the great goddess of beauty, (Greek, Aphrodite, Roman Venus) she rises from the sea. From this moment on our human presence gazes upon beauty that it struggles to know. "What does it mean to struggle to know what one's own picturing soul wants gazing upon its own eros awakening from within the gaze?" asks Russian born Anatoly Karlin...

What does it mean to ‘want’? Negatively defined, it is to be deficient in something, such that the absence of it grates on the soul. When we look at a picture, in a sense it becomes a part of us, a simulation in that part of the brain responsible for visual processing. Conflicts can appear between our innate sense of aesthetics and the simulation that was thrust into our mind. Presumably then, a picture is in want of something if it is deficient in something – an object, or perhaps something more general, say lighting. Or maybe it completely fails to arouse any interest and can be dismissed. In any case, let’s say a picture wants what we want of it.


Karlin goes on to talk about this...When we perceive pictures, we do it from the prism of time and space – a form of intuition, according to Kant in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. (picturing) becomes for us... (parenthetic language and underlining mine)

So when looking at pictures and their wants, we must cast aside the Apollonian and embrace the Dionysian...

 ...and then he writes something important about the need for the experience of beauty, something Abraham Maslow says, if enough of it is missing from our lives, can make us sick...

People seek to add beauty in their lives...

Yet beauty has no moral value of its own. Dostoevsky remarked that ‘beauty is mysterious as well as terrible’; according to Schopenhauer, it reaches its pinnacle in the form of the sublime, a concept of greatness beyond mortal imagination. ___________see What A Picture Wants


So, what I imagine in the picturing language the imaginal poet, ie the "embodying absence" wants to embody in picturing language as poet seems to intuit how to accomplish this. How the poet wants to let the unone, ie "beauty" it loves live again in the erotic picturing language form we call "love" talk or "loving" and... if only for a little while, also, within the aesthetic display, evermore. It is to this sublime nature as muse who (or what) is "poet" speaks. Who is poet speaks the unspeakable. Beauty.