A Poet's Notebook

It is actually pretty fascinating watching a pot boil.

“So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember”

-Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, pg. 7 (Vintage Books Edition)

It was with this suggestion in mind that I decided to put my full attention towards watching a pot boil today.  Even though so many feel as if they are waiting forever for their pots to boil, it is probable that most of these people are just looking at the pot or glancing at the water, not actually observing the water.  I had certainly never looked at boiling water so closely before.

So the way it starts is with a little bit of foam accumulation at the top, in tiny blobs.  The water swirls around in whorls and eventually some of these blobs connect to become bigger blobs, while more tiny blobs appear. This whole process really made me think about the primordial soup and beginnings of life.  One blob connected four times, making quite a big layer of foam, when suddenly the whorling conglomeration was sucked onto the edge of the pot.  This just started happening, soon almost all of the foam had disappeared at the edges of the water, pushing itself onto the pot. Next, the tiny bubbles which had appeared at the bottom of the pot, making something of a reef of bubbles, began to enlarge.  Some of these bubbles popped off and rose to the surface, and some of these connected to make couplets and triplets of bubbles (like molecules!) Then the bubbles on the bottom got larger, the whorling got faster, and instead of making bubbles that lied on the surface, quick bubbles rushed to the top and popped upon contact with air.  This happened for a while, faster, faster, the water whorling, steam coming up, and…then I put the pasta in the pot.  But I am assuming that greater bubbles would come, and then they would just keep rising up.  I have seen that part of the boiling process before.

Now, I haven’t studied much chemistry, so maybe this process is obvious to a lot of people, but I really found it beautiful, how the build-up takes place and these similar forms of water connect with each other, foam with foam, tiny bubbles with tiny bubbles, and then find themselves extinguished at the water’s edge, allowing for the next stage of bubbling evolution to take place.  Also, the pasta was delicious. :)

I want to make a strong effort to be ultra-observant as often as possible.  Doing this all the time would be overwhelming, but really, I can’t believe I had never seen water boil before. I am sure there are other things I am missing in life, and which will increase my appreciation for our physical world.

“ When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. (…) The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes ”

T.S. Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets

“ [a poet] is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.”

W.B. Yeats

I like these two quotes together; however,  am not exactly sure what they mean when put together.  They come from poets with very different styles.  Whereas Yeats is often thought of as the tail end of Romanticism, Eliot’s work played a huge part in defining modernism.  While Yeats looked into history for answers, writing about Tarot and the occult, Eliot felt the modern poet had to break past the ideas of history, and he parodied the occult in the “Madame Sosotris” section of The Wasteland.

As for what I get out of their different views of poetry, I definitely agree that a poet must be ultra-observant and able to see the threads between events, feelings, the interconnectedness of all existence that others might miss. But should all poems be written in a way that reflects this overwhelming activity, which ultimately will always harbor some doubt and confusion?  I am unclear about that.  I greatly enjoy writing poems which are piled with stuff, but I worry that others may not understand my point of view. And indeed, many people are put off by Eliot’s referential ways.  And besides, even Eliot’s poems seem to make some effort to clearly tie pieces together, to carry some sort of intended message.  I suppose we all must be aware of the chaos which surrounds us, take it in and not be afraid to be free in one’s thought movements, but also not be afraid of making a point.  I believe that, for most people, if a poem that does not follow some sort of structure and does not leave the reader with a specific impression (i.e. Yeat’s “complete”) then it will probably not have what might be the “purpose of art”, i.e.  to transfer thoughts and experiences from one mind (the author’s) to another (the reader’s).

More on the purpose of art…eventually. Maybe soon!