poetry as performative revelation

Wrote this earlier today for a feature on a friend's website. I think it sounds kind of pompous, but it really is what I think . . .

I came to poetry as a frustrated philosopher, creatively paralyzed by both the lack of outlets for philosophical discussion outside of academia as well as the hypercritical self-doubt that the discipline can inspire. Poetry struck me as a way of accomplishing, in the real world, more or less the same thing as philosophy: the revelation of either being (philosophy) or truth (poetry) by means of language. The latter, poetry, accomplishes this by literally enacting and embodying what philosophy demonstrates through rational argument, description, and critique.

The performative nature of poetry (that is, the fact that, as the old saying goes, it “shows” rather than “tells”) liberates it from the obligation of making discursive or narrative “sense”. The poem need not represent anything at all, any more than an abstract painting or a piece of “pure” non-programmatic music (e.g., most jazz improvisation or classical music prior to and after the romantic era). Like these other art forms, poetry is essentially mute; it does not speak, but rather uses the raw material of language to accomplish or demonstrate, to embody -- and it does so silently: a pantomime in language. It tells us nothing. But if we let it carry us along, suspending our need for sense and narrative just like we suspend our disbelief when reading a work of fiction or watching a narrative film, it reveals the world by enacting it – and not the world that we know, but the world as it really is, which, to us, is always something foreign, alien, uncanny, wholly Other.