The poet is engaged in something closely analogous to trying to remember a poem they have forgotten. While all poetic devices serve to increase the memorability of the poem for the reader (they all play a mnemonic role in addition to any other they might have), for the poet, their function is weirdly inverted: they are the very means, the intuitive tools of retrieval, by which the poem itself is drawn forth from the mind. The 'little machine for remembering itself' is doing just that, and—if the poet is working well—it can feel as if it is conjuring itself from nothing. All the tropes and schemes that help us achieve our brevity, originality and patterning are, in a sense, really as much aide-memoires to the poet as to the reader, and their experiences in writing and reading the poem can be strangely mirrored. These features, then, are not mere 'effects,' but together form the engine of poetic composition itself. For many poets I know, the good poem has the certainty of a thing recalled as true, and they labour towards the final poem as towards a clear and indelible memory.
—Don Paterson, The Poem
Anything
"Anything is better than nothing" is the ultimate rule (or reality) of the universe.
Labels: thought