Where Does Poetry Come From?

Someone asked me recently what the poem My Couch Says is about. I struggled to answer, feeling foolish. What made you write it, they pressed. I said something about the strange feeling of being so insulated from the people we see every day in the news, whose lives are dominated by war or poverty.

The question reminded me of an answer a poet gave in a talk I went to some years before - he said suffering was necessary to write poetry. I disagree. Thinking something you can't express with normal language is what's necessary. You must feel something you cannot speak, so it lurks in you, until it attaches to a metaphor and escapes onto the page! That's a poem. But it doesn't have to be tragic. Sometimes your thoughts just need to be constructed in second person with an upbeat rhythm to feel fully expressed.

And I realise that is not just about poetry. It's about all art. To dance, to paint - these expressions carry ideas too layered for words. They tell of contradictions and parallels; They say many things at once that can only be said together. 

Sometimes we ask what came first: complex thought or complex language. Since an inner voice expresses our thoughts, could we think without words? It's a concept experimented with in the book 1984: A language, Newspeak is created with limited vocabulary, to control human thought. For example, the word love is forbidden in the belief that humans won't feel love without a word to think it. 

While it is certainly true that language shapes our perception of reality, surely that which cannot be expressed still remains inside us. Are the arts not evidence of that? Emotional cocktails finally finding a way to escape without the traditional constructs of language. Otherwise there would be no need for expression other than the form we are taught.

Thank goodness language is inadequate! The next time someone asks me what a poem is about, I'm going to say, If I could explain that, it wouldn't exist!