Category: Language

Given Being

What does poetry have to do with philosophy? Well, consider certain words that live their lives in the conversations of philosophers. Shouldn’t poets know how to play the whole piano?

Take ‘being’: poets should be able to use that word mindfully,?in full awareness of its multiple usages and ambiguities. And then certain phrases, like ‘given being,’ where idioms cast light on dark places in all too often univocal concepts.

‘Given being’: that is, given the irreducible presence of being in consciousness, what follows? That is, being-as-not a construction of thought but an irreducible primordial sine qua non (since nothing comes from nothing and nothing has relevance only in light of the somethingness of being).

And there you go, the grammar of an ordinary word leads into the complexities and finesses of the fidelities of thought, anciently called philosophy.

This Juice and Joy

John Burnside is a canny maker. He knows how to move from a familiar “quote” to a fabric of known unknowns (“we pray a spring will come / to comprehend it, all this juice and joy // informing a world …”.). The finesse of Burnside’s technique is no sophistry but cleaves to a narrative ‘inscribed’ in the consciousness of time-out-of-time (in saecula saeculorum)

Is this ‘lyric’ personal or self-consciously liturgical? Or both? However we handle such questions, the poem is a fine example of how language — a snatch like “juice and joy” which has its own felicitous shapeliness —- reaches beyond itself.
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Language Senses

The roots of poetry are in the language. ‘The language’?
Well, that multidimensional object-medium that allows us a sense of ourselves and our world.
Language can be known in terms of being. William Desmond exhaustively defines four aspects: the univocal (the out there, rationally necessary), the equivocal (sense changing with context), the dialectical (the sense yielded by questions and answers), and the metaxological (the sense, fundamental to poetry, of the special open whole that draws on all the other senses and limits them by its sense of transcendence, of ongoing expanding relevance to what it is to be awake, mindful, in and through language).
Poems are true to ‘the language’ in varying degrees; so are poets; so are readers.