Self expression in poetry

You don't need to talk about your feelings or yourself to express yourself through art and creativity. You can make art about the world, make it as realistic as you'd like, and it is still self-expression. Anything you might create about the world outside yourself is also about you. Because you always observe the world, your point of view changes the world you see and is always present in your depictions of it. Further, what you think of as the world outside is a model in your mind made of your assembled sense-impressions. The thing you normally think of "the world" is you.

Before I get into philosophy, let me give some practical examples.

Eff the ineffable with sensory detail #

When I was a teen, I was fascinated by books that made me feel a certain ineffable thing that I called "the taste." (No, I can't describe it. It's ineffable.) I tried to figure out how they did it. It had nothing to do with plot, or character, or genre, and a book that was otherwise not particularly good would have a part that made the ineffable feeling happen. It was a great mystery. I started reading more closely to spot these elusive passages. Ray Bradbury stories tended to cause the feeling particularly often, and I found my first definitive example in one of his. I think it might have been "The Veldt." It had something about a wall, or maybe wallpaper, and perhaps someone touching it. I started to get that it had to do with sensory detail, but I wasn't quite sure how to work it myself.

Then, when I was 14 an older student came to my English class to talk about poetry, and I learned the trick. She had taken a poetry class with a locally famous poet, Hugh Ogden, and he had taught them all one simple thing. He taught them that every poem must include each of the senses: vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste. (Yes, I listed them here deliberately in the order it's most difficult to do so.) She then read us a poem she had written following this rule. It was very moving and I was impressed.

That's when I made the connection about the writing I found most compelling. The Ray Bradbury stories that made me feel most intensely didn't describe feelings, but rather described the sensory detail of things, and that then evoked the feelings, including the most ineffable one, the taste. I felt like I had been handed the key to a great mystery.

Soon after that, I started studying with Hugh Ogden myself, and learned most of the things that made me a skilled poet from him in a few years. For a long time, I wrote all my poetry following that rule, though, if you read the things I've posted here, you'll see that I have broken out of complete adherence to it.

The key isn't just that describing the sensory detail evokes feelings, but rather that the feelings are evoked by the world and images of the world. Thus, by conjuring an image of the world, you conjure the feelings. Including the five senses in every poem is a useful technique for doing that, but it isn't the only way.

The observer is always included in the observation #

Early in my training as a poet, a poet I knew described a poem she's written and shared with her teacher. The poem, if I recall her description of it, was mostly about looking around at a room, maybe with an open door. After she read it, her teacher knew that the poem was about having been raped. She never mentioned it in the poem. She only described with exquisite detail what the room looked like to her. Simply by attending to the detail, and which detail she attended to, she expressed a profoundly emotional and difficult event about her life.

The example convinced me that attending to the world and just showing it was an effective approach to writing expressive poetry.

It's not a view everyone shares, of course. I've received workshop feedback about some of my poems criticizing them for being too cold or not having self-expression, of being just descriptions of things, like a page in a nature guidebook. I'm willing to accept the poems aren't moving for them, and maybe aren't effective poems, but I disagree with the aesthetic stance. Behind everything I might describe is an I who has seen it. Simply by choosing to write at length about a Steller's jay as opposed to just any blue jay or blue bird, or no bird at all, I made an expressive choice. If I wanted to write my intellectual opinion, I would write an essay instead (as indeed I am doing). And feelings, well, whatever man, everyone has feelings and I don't think coarse feelings are all that interesting, as an aesthetic subject.

Even somebody who just takes photos of skyscrapers is practicing self-expression. They have chosen to take photos. They have chosen what to take photos of, and when. They have chosen the angle and the light and the post processing. Every choice is a choice of their self, a choice of self-expression.

The world within us #

But it goes further. It is not merely the case that in any observation of a world, be it a poem, a photo, or a painting or anything else, there is an observer. In fact, the world is within the observer. To observe the world is to observe your own self, or rather, this thing you think of as you is like a little partition you have made, splitting yourself into the observer and the outside objects.

Anything you observe is already within the field of your own mind. Kant got at this with the idea of noumena and phenomena. Phenomena are what we observe through our senses. Noumena are the reality that underlies the phenomena, and can't be accessed directly. We have the evidence of our senses, and we interpret it to mean things about what happened and presume a physical reality exists beyond^[1].

Buddhist masters, especially the Dzogchen ones, speak about this as well. The out there you perceive is in here. That is, everything that you perceive is indirect, it is data that comes in through your sense organs and then is assembled into a world in your mind^[2]. Your sense of your own body is as much a construct as your abstract verbal self or the things you see. It's not that there isn't a physical world out there, a real world of noumena, but you never interact with it unmediated. It's always a version that arises from your senses. It is, in fact, an expression of you.

That's why even if all you write about is the world outside of yourself, what you produce is always already self-expression.

Next time, painting #

Next time, I'm going to talk about expressing feelings with watercolor paintings, Rothko, and the way the world looks different when you're depressed or in love.