Poetry as Perceiving

          I was in a seminar and we were reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” It is a great poem about perceiving, about the difficulty of knowing something accurately and poetically. In this sense, we could say that it captures the poetic angst that language fails to completely describe a scene; and to extend it, emotions. I have realised that when I read poetry, I carry a lot of baggage, I want it to teach me something: maybe about grappling with life, or how poets deal with life – because I think that they are oftentimes the most acute observers of it; maybe about social ills, how poets challenge – or even promote – the ‘ideologies’ we are enslaved to. I want it to be didactic, similar to how liberal humanists approached literature.

          Yet going through this seminar, I’ve realised that my mind needs to be trained to see, not recognise. But perhaps more than see, I need to perceive. I need to be sensitive to sound, to syntax, to diction and the ways words on a page relate to one another. I think poetry is poetry because it is unfamiliar, there is an element of ‘enstrangement’ (to borrow from Shklovsky) so that we are led ‘to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition’ (Art as Device).

          However, to be attentive to words is, I think, at the same time to be aware of its inadequacy to fully convey meaning. Bishop’s poem certainly does suggest that. It is a picture of perception, showing us its difficulties but also the ‘rainbow’ moments when we finally see. I think that kind of epiphany is akin to the ‘road to Emmaus’ seen where after Jesus shows how all Scripture points and is fulfilled in him, Cleopas and his friend said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32).

          Sadly, I think those moments are hard to come by, because we are swamped with the automatising and desensitising effects of the media empire. We as people don’t see anymore, because everything happens so quickly, there is no time to stop and stare and be amazed – amazed at how beautiful and ugly this world we live in is. Words and images do not make us think anymore, because to stop is to be left behind.

          So then I should be more attentive to words, and because words do not exist in a vacuum, to the people who say them or write them. Perhaps this will grant me a greater awareness of what others are thinking and feeling. Because I believe reading poetry is a process of training the mind’s eyes to see rather than recognise, then I hope I will be trained to see people rather than recognise them.

          There is probably an unspoken criterion that good poetry has to meet: universality. And on Calvary, the living Word who became flesh perceived human existence in all its glory and horror; he is both the particular and the universal. He is the light that gives people the ability to perceive. In other words, He is the perfect poetry.