Some Lessons from Poetry

My love of poetry began when I was a student at Bennington College and I heard Frank Bidart speak as part of a lecture series. He talked about how “talent” is such an unnecessary word to use when considering poetry. He said that being a poet has to do with a palpable need to engage with and respond to the world in a particular and sensitive way. I was very touched by his lecture and I immediately realized that his perspective applied to painting as well.

Around the same time, I was introduced to the poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens. This beautiful poem was simultaneously familiar and completely foreign to me. I loved the poem immediately and understood the words intuitively, but I also had a deep desire to ponder it more fully. I hoped that some day, someone might have a similar response to even just one of my paintings.

Since those early discoveries, I’ve always enjoyed poetry in and for itself but I also realized I wanted to immerse myself in poetry in order to understand painting more completely. Over time I gleaned so much about painting from poetry including the importance of considering form, the power of metaphor, and the necessity to engage with subjects outside of myself.

From poetry I learned that the way something is made is as important as the work’s subject. Or, the way something is constructed holds clues to its meaning. The form embodies what the whole thing is. A painting, for example, could be a figurative scene or an abstract composition, but first and foremost it is a painting.

Reading and writing poetry instilled in me an appreciation for strong metaphor. Strong metaphors do not feel trite. They surprise. They are specific and immediate. They challenge us. Metaphors remind us of things we didn’t know that we knew. They happen in successful paintings and successful poems.

When you examine something outside of yourself, the work (a painting, poem or any other form) becomes a conversation between you as the maker, and the world. The object or poem itself also exists outside of the maker and finds its own place in the world.

By looking outside of ourselves, we allow metaphor and form to fully take shape. Our observations and responses do reflect our own thoughts, emotions, and questions because the conversation is embodied in the form.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke tells his young friend, “…seek those themes which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.”