I'm reading Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry, which is his take on formative American poets from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo. He describes language as a "structured system of communication, the poet's toolbox." And immediately I am thinking, poet's toolbox? That doesn't sound quite right.
Is language a tool, our tool, we writers of poems?
I've mused with my W@1 cohort that language is more like the stuff of poetry. It is the material which we work into art, just as stone is the sculptor's material and sound is the composer's.
You can argue, I suppose, that experience is the poet's material. After all, we do say of a writer's work, "Her material is the family she grew up in"; or "He shapes his material (i.e., his experience at Normandy in 1944) into an epic story of struggle and heroism."
But language is the poet's material because poetry is language that calls attention to itself as material; poetry foregrounds the materiality of language, its organic characteristics, its physicality.
Poets don't write grammar. Grammar - systems of linguistic structure - is the tool that poets use when working with their material.
If you made a sliding scale of these things, from the most abstract to the least, it might look like this:
Grammar ---- Experience ---- Language ---- Words ---- Sound
The farther along the scale you go, the more you enter the world most conducive to poetry, where words and sounds leave meaning behind to foreground their physical being . . . and the more deeply they penetrate the ear, and the more intimate your relationship with them becomes.
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