I guess it all depends what you mean by "stupid" and also what you
mean by "intelligent". Eliot says for instance that to write poetry
one just has to be "very. very intelligent". I think he's right, too.
But there seems to be a certain necessary kind of disabling
(Baudelaire springs to mind: "poetry must be a debacle of the
intellect") which happens in the process of writing poems. And I'm
also thinking of St John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul, which
is pretty interesting even for atheist poets, because so much of it
deals with the boundaries of language, of what cannot be said. And
one of the symptoms of approaching God that John lists is a phase of
stupidity, of an inability to think intellectually. I associate that
also with Mandelstam's description of what he called "pre-lyrical
anxiety" (a good excuse next time you need to get out of a boring
invite).
There's something inhibiting in the cerebral dominance of
intellection which is hostile to poetry, and which has to be put
aside. And what happens instead? Some kind of integration, isn't
it, which isn't quite the work of ratiocination, but other
processes...
Which maybe suggests, Josephine, that not writing poetry is as
important as writing it, because you never quite know what is going
on in the dark recesses of your head. Well, that's my excuse anyway.
Poetry if it turns up usually takes me by surprise.
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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