Is Poetry the Result of Intelligence or Feelings?*
By: Mario Savioni
Tags: Intelligence, Feelings, Poetry, Production

Picture of Tree Branches by Mario Savioni

The “art” of poetry is a thing disconnected from it’s maker, although there are many great names, like Ashbery, Eliot, and Hejinian, within whose hands words seem to have an elegance and beauty. I don’t know their methods. I just know their work.

I have a book called The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which is chocked-full of such examples.

Poetry, at least for me, comes like a stream of consciousness, and if I can capture its flow exactly, I usually have a good poem. There have been poems that I have manufactured. I think both come from ekphrastic events, whether in life or from another artistic work that blankets me with its aesthetic sentiments.

Streamed:

Silent, gliding bells of grace/impure moments chief alight/the moon whose purple heart collides/with savage curls of smoke… (From the poem “First Rain/Cry of Faith”, which came to me as I was listening to the song of the same name by Ottmar Liebert).

Manufactured:

At 12:30PM,/Glenn and I are partially under a/terminal’s green ceiling, on the tarmac/against a prone concrete/column./Aluminum and cloth/tots repose, like appareled/robots, knapsacks for our/clothes, (From the poem “Molokai Ali’i”, which I wrote over the course of several months after a hiking trip to the Wailau Valley on Molokai).

I think we all, who love poetry, recognize poems we love from those we do not. Even more difficult is to express why they are good or bad. Someone like Louise Glück can. In fact, I have argued that Glück does so poetically (See: Poetry is not a Diary — Thoughts on Louise Glück’s poetry, and a bit about her prose).

If I might get back to your question, is poetry a by-product of intelligence or feelings? I have to say that it is both. Without having read and garnered a familiarity with words and how they work together, coupled with a deep sensitivity to the melody of the sound and meaning brought on by a probable genetic predisposition and even affected by the environment, a person may be inclined to find poetry to be something very important.

A hack might be the person with mere intelligence, because poetry embodies an emotional sensitivity, but oft intelligent poems, like those of George Oppen, engage one’s appreciation for meaning inherent in arrangement and meaning. But, I feel Oppen is a man also endowed with pitch perfect emotional aesthetics. He would have to be to know what words to pick and what linguistic elements would speak so eloquently.

I think what you are doing when you provide an anectdote about poets who stand before kings and who hold to their beliefs about what is good from what is bad, is that you are trying to say that you either have it or you don’t. I think the artistry of poetry comes from a predisposition and from practice. You might even say that it comes from the development of an ear for words. I wrote poorly as a boy but I held great interest in words and eloquence. Eventually, I have come up with a few good poems, as e.e. cummings said. Like the king’s poet, I have lived in the barn, but not from being critical of others’ words, but just from holding close to what I love.

*From: https://www.quora.com/What-exactly-is-the-art-of-poetry-Is-it-a-phenomena-of-creative-intelligence-or-aesthetic-feelings