The following is a meditation on poetry. It falls pretty much in the centre of my novel Dark Matters. It is poetry that is keeping the main character Kate/Ekaterina going while she is imprisoned and enduring very dark times.
In some ways it reflects the cover image by my friend the artist, Suzanne Bellamy. She asked me to add these lines:
Cover art: Suzanne Bellamy, Road Map 2010. Etched embossed monoprint on Fabriano paper. The image interprets a photograph of Mitochondria, the Motherline DNA, from an old Scientific American photograph.
I love the idea of mitochondria and poetry keeping parallel information and knowledge alive.
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It’s all in the touch of the bone. Letters in words. Structure is what makes it, otherwise we’re toothless flowing like a figure in amber. You’d think that a happy outcome, but what are arms without muscle? Poetry is that muscle.
As epic it is passed down through many generations. It flourishes in metrical formulas. Metaphors are tendons, holding bone and muscle together. Owl-eyed Athena does more than describe her eyes, it provides a way for the poet to keep speaking finding a way to the next poetic line.
As lyric it sings its way into the heart. Desire flings itself about. The names of flowers and blossoms proliferate, butterflies procreate. Deathless love reigns.
Poetry builds line by line. Letters, syllables and words all count. Some languages allow you to read back and forth up and down. I remember reading a book about Sanskrit poetry. You can create compound words, a bit like those long dense German words which you can never quite understand. In Sanskrit you can add another layer because you can break the words in different places so the long word means two completely different things. They call this shlesha.
Poetry is the infrastructure of language. In it are grammars of memory, this and that, stories and myths. It’s an organic way of remembering all the necessary knowledge for survival.
Mountains and rocks are a substratum, a place to put those memories, to remind us of deities and ancestors, to bring animals at the right time of year, to make the plants efficacious in healing. Poetry makes all this possible
Mentifacts are artefacts of the mind left behind by those who went before. You find them in the oldest poems and songs recited and chanted to secure the synapses’ snapping connections, creating culture that will be passed down through countless generations without change. Metre keeps it firm.
You find mentifacts in stone circles, carved into rock walls, the handprint and the animal footprint leading the way, the motion of the stars followed by word and rock. Constellations rise and set along the ecliptic of the mind.
You find mentifacts in dance and music, the body’s form taking so many shapes, dancing emu on one continent, trumpeting elephants on another. Music trembles, the body is a concatenation of limbs and rhythm.
Pelasgian poetry is as old as the hills. Metre feeds into Homer’s words, that blind poet who spoke of the transformation of souls and animals inhabiting another dimension, the dimension of peasant poetry. He carries poems like fruits in a basket, a fusion of colour and sound.
pp. 68-69, Dark Matters: A novel.
(Meet Mago Contributor) Susan Hawthorne.
Re Susan Hawthorne
“Poetry is the infrastructure of language. In it are grammars of memory, this and that, stories and myths. It’s an organic way of remembering all the necessary knowledge for survival.”
Brilliant