Poetry Logs

Poets do more than just write poems. Poets talk poetry. They talk to each other and their poems talk to each other, too. This is poetry talking Poetry, traversing its own terrain.

Poetics belongs to imaginal or archetypal psychology. Poetry's psychology is one of craft. (James Hillman, Dreams 138) Poetry's myth is a myth of making. The soul in poetry expresses psyche-in-the-making. What gets made? What substance and matter is poetry? What stuff? What happens in creative space when a poem in psyche is
in-the-making?

Poets are discussing their work with each other. This is because their work is psychic work and their poetic work here makes psychic work matter in poetic terms. The poet turns his and her natural life over and through this stuff in matters, these substances. That may be the first thing every poem holds in common. In common or communal space, the poem-as-symbol, opens up in revelation this space for making.

The space of a poem solidifies a 'stuff' that matters. Poetry-making works into shapes the images that rise from the plasticity of the imagination. This is Bachelard's notion in The Poetics of Reverie (156) when he speaks about the "softness" of the fruit that one holds.

The fruit that one holds...gives a pledge of ripeness...transparent...ripeness economized...for the benefit of one hour...Rilke proposes... Tanzt die orange:

Dance the orange. The warmest countryside,
Project it out from you, that it may radiate ripeness
in the air of its land! ... Sonnets I, no. XV, trans. Angelloz, p171

Poetry Logs is designed to accommodate this symbol-developing process by keeping an archive in poetic images held in context during discussions we poets are having privately. You, the reader, get to see a bit of this carnival of image in bricolage i.e. as disparate formations drawn-together in condensating activity toward reformation; the softness is a density or thickness always shaped, always imaged. James Hillman writes, Dichtung, poetry, from Dicht, "dense" occurs both in the German Verdichtung, Freud's term for 'condensation' and in Dichtung, 'poetry'. Poets are Dichters. (Dreams, 134)

Images of imagination are always 'dancing.' And this betrays what poetry is and what poems do. Poetry is image-making. The poem you eventually experience as readers expresses worked soul. The soul of each new poem reveals a fantasy image in the psyche and gives the livelier sense in our own perception of this poetic image more value, more depth, more 'psychic weight.' Poetic thinking fructifies psyche. Poetic images are sexy. They Dicht tease. They entice you to see through their condensations.

Layers of psychic softness are fluid but coagulate and thicken and are always formed as precise images; images like oranges belong to the material imagination of Ge or Gaia or "Psyche's Earth." They are what we are, but 'are' where we are not. The poet's work bridges this gap and brings the poetic images here to us. The poetic images of poetry will teach us, if we let them, how to enter and be where we are not.

Poetry Logs invites you to come home to the orange. Enjoy. Take in some of poetry's substance-in-the-making. Consider your own poetic experience in this space provided.

perhaps you will then
pick up your own pen
project the density there

in the air
in the land
in your hand

the ripeness of it poetry
filling and filled the space
no longer empty the dance

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos.Trans., Daniel Russell. Beacon Press: Boston, 1971.

Hillman, James. Dreams and the Underworld. Harper & Row: New York, 1979.