Poetry as bending of perspectives, resistance, and weaving social bonds

At the end of May, at the first official presentation of my second poetry book, my editor posed a series of excellent questions. In responding, I attempted to trace the neuralgic points of different ways of perceiving poetry, of our poetic landscape and, as with everything else, the power relations embedded within it. Towards the end of the presentation, I was asked the popular but no less legitimate and exciting question: how can poetry still address the younger generations? And in my over-saturated, racing mind I asked myself a host of other questions: Lara, what does poetry mean to you? What is and what should be the role of poetry? What does poetry tell us? Where does its power reside? In what ways does it carry the potential for critical action and subversion? And above all – which is what this essay is committed to exploring – what could be the role of poetry? But let me return to the question that I actually received that evening: how could poetry address the younger generations (assuming decent literacy and actual contact with contemporary poetry on their part)?

Despite the appareent simplicity of the above questions, they nevertheless call for multifaceted answers and analysis, engaging with various themes within the social sciences and the humanities. In this essay, however, I will take a more reflective approach, grounded in my own perception and relationship with poetry, shaped by personal experience and the texts I have encountered. What follows is an outline of my reflections on what poetry means to me, and how it speaks to me as a member of the younger generation.

It has always been important to me to write things down, to give form and structure to this quite chaotic matter of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’. Accordingly, poetry, whether in writing or reading, for me, offers the most concentrated space of reflection and self-reflection.

Although it is being pushed to the margins,[1] I see poetry as a form of resistance. More precisely, a rebellion against haste and hyperproduction. Poetry requires us to slow down, to stop, to stretch our intellect and our senses, enter a state of deepened receptivity – and it claims us whole. Of course, we know that being in the present moment appears to be quite challenging today.

I find the processes of reading and writing poetry to be an excellent training in intellectual courage, and I see it as another layer of rebellion. Today we are constantly bombarded by dominant discourses that want to lead our thought down well-trodden paths, usually in the service of neoliberal capitalism, while poetry guides us to new mental and sensory connections and ultimately trains us to ‘read between the lines’, which is the basis of critical thinking. In today’s times of excess of information and radicalisation (fascisation) of socio-political conditions and the resulting greater susceptibility of the masses to manipulation by political figures, I see the critical thinking as particularly important. Intellectually more challenging processes like reading poetry and consuming other types of more demanding content teach us abstract thinking and helps us understand and reflect on more complex topics and enter into dialogue with ourselves and the traditions of human thought. By addressing more complex themes and issues, the individual builds his or hers autonomy and freedom of thought.

I think that the rebellious character of poetry also lies in the fact that it directs us beyond algorithmic, uniform thinking. It steers us beyond the boundaries of conventional, instrumentalised and bureaucratised meanings, and therefore holds the potential to open up new possibilities of being. The liberating potential of poetry is also manifested through its liberation from normative models of perception and the consideration of the relationship between words and reality. Therefore, poetry holds the potential of breaking the linearity and uniformity of thought which, at its core, is rarely linear and arrives as a set of fragments that span time – at a conscious or unconscious level, it moves between the present, the future and the past. One could say that poetry is a kind of portal for an authentic and multi-layered experience.

Berardi (2012) writes about poetry resisting the algorithmic structure of language. Only an act of language, one that goes beyond technical automatism (the techno-linguistic structure of finance capitalism), in which universal grammar has been replaced by economics, can make possible change – which either way happens in language first – and create new forms of socio-political life. This is evident, among other things, by the role of poetry in the emancipation of marginalised subjectivities.

The verses and poetic imagery, regardless of the degree of (in)directness of utterance, often contain a multi-layered meaning, which in poetry can be constructed in a non-linear but simultaneous fashion, and as such holds the potential of expanding into the field of bodily experience and engaging multiple senses, facilitating our entry, or even inviting us, into the world of the Other.

Deleuze (1997) also associates writing, which he sees as a forever unfinished process of ‘becoming’, with a kind of rebellion and a space of special sensitivity for the Other. He understands writing as a rejection of fixed form; thus, in the process of becoming, one never becomes a man, since ‘man’ in our society represents a dominant expressive form – a universal and normative field. In contrast, the plant, the animal, and the woman embody a fugitive substance that continually escapes formalisation.

Kearney (2003) similarly attributes an important and ethical role to the postmodern imagination involved in writing poetry, which is supposed to liberate and expand our receptivity to the Other. By deconstructing our ‘pseudo-images of the self’ into an interplay of unlimited possibilities, the poetic imagination is supposed to be able to bring us closer to the Other. It is exactly poetic imagination, ready to explore the various possibilities of social existence, that Kearney argues could also fuel alternative social projects. Kearney states that art, as an open laboratory, is a powerful reminder that history is always in progress and is one of the most persuasive heralds of a poetics of the possible.

Furthermore, a poem can offer a kind of ‘bending of perspectives’. I see poetry offering a space where language can ‘dislocate from its joint’. I think it can offer an insight into a particular state of the self and/or the world from a new angle, resisting the conventional and ‘bending perspectives’ with its particular, unique use of language. To me, every process of writing a poem is an expedition into the yet unspoken, sometimes unknown. The same happens in reverse with the reader’s experience, which a poem can bring into contact with its fragments that are part of the reader’s experience of the self and/or the world, but this time, perhaps even for the first time, articulated in a surprisingly precise way. Precise in the sense of the consequence – a ‘self-recognition’ or identification as a special feeling of being seen and heard, a reassuring contact with something that reflects the general chaos, but at the same time bypasses it. ‘A meeting of a scream and pianissimo’, which has a surprising self-grounding power.

Poetry also speaks to me through its dialogical and ethical nature. Inherent in every poem are invisible spaces of silence which invite the reader to co-create it. It, then, also requires the reader to search for a common language with the poem or with the author – again and again, every time she or he steps into it. Dialogue and common language are something to be reinvented and sought over and over.

I deeply believe that, through dialogue, a poem offers insight into the state of the self and of the world. Every poem is a response and an act of opening oneself to the understanding of the other. It is for this reason that the concept of hermeticism often brought up in connection with poetry hides a paradox – the act of opening up, uncovering, letting the other into the core of what is written, is already embedded in the poem placed in time and space. The lack of an active reader’s stance, the skill or the courage to create one’s own interpretation when met with less conventional literary styles, is assigned other labels and attributes.

I briefly return again to Deleuze, for whom literature contains two aspects: the deconstruction, the demolition of the mother tongue, but at the same time, through the creation of syntax, the invention of a new language within a language (Deleuze and Guattari, 1975). In the process of writing, the invention of the new (language) is linked to moments of imagination, creativity, innovation and ontological creativity, which are also essential for thinking of good or better socio-political models. I believe that the creation of something new in the process of writing is linked to the sensitivity towards the world and that the contemplation of new possibilities for a more egalitarian coexistence will always involve creative processes. The field of creativity and the imagining of the new first requires the emergence of a kind of rift, which is a space of extreme openness, often inseparable from the tension we feel in relation to the world and the events in it.

Furthermore, poetry also speaks to me as a possible space of subversion of the logic of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism is based on the stability and predictability of linguistic and cultural codes that, among other things, reinforce its value system of individualism, competition, rivalry and unlimited growth. Deconstruction and the invention of a new language within a language in this context undermines these presumptions. Postmodern literature, for example, often engages with the idea of destabilising linear narratives and traditional concepts of identity, opening up a space for questioning the norms that neoliberal capitalism uses in the process of affirming its legitimacy.

I think that in poetry there is a kind of invisible weaving of the social bond at work. I would argue that the origin of poetry is in the communal and that it could not exist without something within us that attunes us to one another. Poetry is not merely a matter of the individual; it does not uphold isolated subjectivity within human society, but addresses the narratives woven into the very fabric of social existence. Poetry articulates, either explicitly or implicitly, the symptoms of social ailments.[2] At the core of the neoliberal capitalist paradigm is the reproduction of confrontation and competition, which ensures that no bonds are formed between us, thereby fragmenting society into individuals. In other words, it ensures the gradual erosion of society. In this context, by articulating the symptoms of social ills, poetry performs the function of bringing people together and weaving social bonds. In this way, the principle of competition can, in the event created by the poem, shift into a field of empathic dialogue and solidarity. I therefore believe that poetry carries the potential to undermine the logic of neoliberal capitalism and open up the possibility of a more solidaristic society – one still marked by negative symptoms which can only become empathetically acknowledged once they are articulated. This is the first step towards the possibility of a more solidarity-based society.

Because I believe these are inexhaustible themes that call for multi-layered analysis, I do not want to finish this essay with any definitive conclusions. As in poetry, I merely wish to open a space for further inquiry.

To leave space

for an echo

References:

• Berardi, Franco. The Uprising: On poetry and finance. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2012.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Essays critical and clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a minor literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975.
• Kearney, Richard. The wake of imagination. London: Routledge, 2003.

[1] It seems that poetry is also marginalised because it was never meant to generate money and be useful in a utilitarian sense. It causes an uneasiness to people whose value system is reduced only to effects translatable into capital.

[2] Personal experience, too, invariably takes place on the canvas of a particular social condition. Poetry, regardless of its degree of tendentiousness, intimism or so-called hermeticism, is always a response. And response, by its very nature, cannot exist in isolation from the socio-political sphere; it is thus inherently political. Poetry, in any of its forms, cannot be severed from life and the conditions that shape it.