“There once was a man from Calcutta, who happened to love peanut butter......”. As with most people, poetry is not gift I have. A poet is a wordsmith. Poets hold words together, chasing after the lost ones; they understand their deeper meanings and feelings.
I may not be a poet, but I do love words – I should, I deal with them all the time. However, I as I get older I find that I am drawn to poetry more than before. Not that it’s an age thing, there are plenty of young poets around, it’s more than that, it has something to do with time.
We all know that form is as important as content. Two minutes of impassioned pleading will shapes the mind and soul more than two hours of solid but bland information. This being the case, a good poet is a force to be reckoned with.
When I think poetry in New Zealand, I think Sam Hunt, Gary McCormick or James K. Baxter. Larger than life characters who have expanded the way we see life and the world. And they have done so through poetry.
Interestingly, these raconteurs have faded from the scene in recent years, and I have wondered why? Perhaps it’s about ‘time’.
The thing about poets is that they force us to slow down. No matter how hard you try you cannot speed-read a poem. Frustratingly, it requires reading and rereading. Unlike prose, which fills the page, poems leave vast amounts of space for reflection and consideration. Words are elongated in the open space and we have to engage with each one.
In prose we read fast. We process quickly. We seek information or immediate excitement. But such reading doesn’t require anything from us. We either like it or dislike it. We agree or we disagree. Yet poetry doesn’t let us off so easily. There’s nothing to “merely understand”. Rather, there are words to be worked through, feelings to be unpacked and meanings that require imagination.
Such writing, or telling, draws on a part of us that rarely sees the light of day in our information driven world. You see, it’s all about time or timing.
Information is about speed and power, not experience. To understand anything is to know that what we know has only been grasped in small pieces; pieces that have been chewed over, experienced and reflected upon.
Poets wrote more than half the Jewish scriptures - the Psalms, Prophets and wisdom literature. In the New Testament Jesus exhibits the same qualities – he was poet.
To know anything about your life, about Christ, or about the scriptures, we must come to them as we would poetry. Divinity is not found in speed-reading to be informed, it is found by engaging deeply with what is written or read to us, or what we have experienced. Only then does informative become formation - it changes the way we see, hear and live. It just takes time.
Digby Wilkinson, 2009