understanding poetry vs poetry helping you understand?
“… I am trying to capture something that is parallel knowledge to facts. — FRANCIS DE LIMA, Poet of the Week
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Francis de Lima is a Finnish-Brazilian poet and translator, currently living in the UK. They are completing their undergrad at Royal Holloway, focusing on the intersections between class, ecology, and poetry. They’ve collaborated extensively, mainly with Finnish underground artists, on projects like art books, albums, and performances at venues ranging from concert halls to backyards. These are their first published poems.
A Stenographer Tries to Finish a Sentence
Look, the tree outside is just a tree, a simple set of deciduous life-expectancy And whenever you talk to me I’m just a headlong hammer, a cracked braying thing, But I know we are not speaking of infinities or perennials, or anything green Look, I’m just trying to explain that to be drowned is just another form of feeling the rain That this here heart-curve, is a chaise lounge for you to put your feet on Not to say you made me furniture, rather when you were looking for syllable, I was a whole chord Pressed in unison, reaching some 300 words per minute, some kind of archive of feeling, surely Look, I’m trying to explain the sign signified relationship but the problem is I’ve kind of Forgotten it because when I look at the tiles shuttering moss on the roof, I see a continent And when I look at you a foreign nation I don’t speak the language of But I can type fast, so I can keep recording what you say whether I get it or not.
“…I am not trying to document, with either art [poetry or film], any facts. The idea is to capture something that is parallel knowledge to those facts.”
I think poetry is a force that operates very much on the same playing field as philosophy and political theory, from a slant angle. I think poetry can mock these other arts, while understanding them. I think poetry can make them in itself and then unmake them. I don’t think poetry could sustain them, but that’s another conversation.
And, as I’ve kind of previously alluded to, I don’t think my poems are just exercises in philosophical thought, though they are that as well. In fact, I think for me it extends somewhere much larger, where poetry becomes a thing that’s complicated enough, irreverent enough, and nebulous enough to become a philosophy in itself. Really, philosophy is framework, isn’t it? It’s a system of understanding something. Like I’ve previously mentioned, I think poetry, as a way of seeing, is also a system of understanding something. That ‘something’ might resist being articulated as clearly (or obscurely) as philosophy would, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Poetry as a kind of phenomenology.
Understanding poetry vs poetry helping you understand — how do you approach the artform?
You can catch up on some of the answers to last week’s question here:
This week, inspired by Francis de Lima’s interview, we’re exploring a bit more of fluid, almost “non-question”. Often we think about how to understand a poem, but alongside that it is a realization for many poets that the very act of writing the poem is a way for them to understand whatever they are grappling with. So, we welcome you to enter that discussion a little. How do you approach the artform, how has poetry helped you understand things? Or perhaps it’s done the opposite, clouded and complicated stuff? All thoughts always welcome.
I started writing poetry as a reaction. I have a chronic illness that made me feel marginalized, and writing helped me to think through complex emotions. I started to extend it to my life as a whole, just trying to make sense of myself and my place in the world. Later on, I felt the need to extend my view even further, and my poems started to comment on the state of the world and how it affected me. Now I mostly write philosophical poems. So yes, poetry has helped me, and is still helping me, to make sense of things. And when I read poetry from someone else I feel like I get to inhabit their body and mind for a few minutes. I think reading and writing poetry is an act of empathy, but it's mostly an intuitive experience.
Amen