Several weeks ago we watched a movie I hadn’t seen in quite some time, Contact, the 1997 movie with Jodie Foster. She finds herself at a loss for words as she struggles to describe the sights and feelings while traveling through a part of space no human had ever seen, at a speed no human had ever traveled. A scientist, equipped with knowledge and the ability to analyze, define and record , could not describe the beauty of the experience. She confesses, “they should have sent a poet.”
There are times I want a poet with me.
But I don’t need one to ravel off angry words or to flash before me snapshot scenes of squalor, or tease me with clever metaphors.
I want a poet who can depict what I cannot yet see, to give words to what I can only feel. A meaning to my experience.
Where does that kind of knowing come from?
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1 comment:
One of my favorite movies ever! They should have sent me! I write prose, close enough! :D
I agree with you that too much of modern poetry tries too hard, it seems, to startle or to evoke an almost non-human sense of thought and feeling, as though (in the highest postmoderns sense) that is all they are left with; alien strands of words as they run from all that came before.
And then their peers stand around and applaud and sadden the little freshman college poetess who doesn't understand why the poetry teacher tells her to conform.
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