mind the gap

But what these paradoxes show is that we could not possibly have an adequate representation of our language, period.
- bas van fraassen

Whatever it may set out to do, poetry doesn’t resolve anything. The claim that it can is spurious. Reality itself is spurious, always looked at from either too close or too far away. It is entirely a proliferation of focal possibilities. Poetry straddles the synonym pairing of insufficiency and surfeit in existence’s rule. It’s quite a big deal.

I place an ‘e’ on the table and ask Arthur what is this? It’s the most used of the five vowels, he rightly answers. Does it have intrinsic merit? No, he says, except maybe as a sound or a visual sign. So what’s it good for? It goes into words to make meaning. Fair enough, I continue, so how much meaning does the letter contribute to individual words or larger compositions? Rhetorical question!—none, of course. So, meaning in language is based on the inherent lack of meaning in its most basic constituents? Maybe so, unless we consider them a residuum or trace: letters retain their shape and element of sound, even as they disappear into words.[1]

When Curnow says the best poems ‘essence, whatever their essence, will elude you’; when Dallas in ‘Overcast’ bemoans ‘a child’s ball spinning on a wave’; when geraets eulogises ‘pleasurables I spy’ and  Anna Jackson ‘bits of me that have travelled / not even me’; when Yourukova quizzes ‘shifts in the random’ and asks ‘is it enough to love the absence of certainty?’—these utterances, placed alongside the certitude of essa may ranapiri’s they ‘will write until they die’, are saying in unison that the latch on the door to poetic statement never holds firm. The unsayable and unsaid (the ‘not yet’) is our life means: this is the ruby poetry enunciates without resolution.

note

[1] The queen of mathematical constants: ‘e=2.71828… and it’s Everywhere (Here’s Why)’ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-IG2dTby6Q>. The same point occurs inversely in ‘Gilmore Girls Season 5 Episode 7 – “Said gap ‘twixt D and F…”’ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iHckencrmk>