Theorum

Jeffrey T. Larson

Theorum

Prose can be hard as you like, let it make you restless.

But poetry is a vibration heard when life is dumb:

shadows move on the hills: pictured wind and clouds,

the going of smoke or life: bright, dim, bright.

a quiet-flowing current, deep clouded forests,

slow-mouldering houses, lanes radiating warmth,

a doorsill worn to a crisp, shadow-silence,

a child's timid step into a room's gloom,

a letter from a far country thrust under the door,

so large, so white it fills all the house

or a day so steely and bright you can hear

how the sun nails fast the blue void door.

Eeva-Liisa Manner

Manner is a Finnish poet, and I wonder what is lost in translation. What comes through is that connection between poetry and silence. It seems contradictory that poetry, expressed in words, could be about wordlessness. Maybe a better way to say it would be that poetry expresses something beyond words, like a quiet awareness, or an inner knowing. Manner uses the word "heard", is she implying that poetry is something already there? It makes sense. I mean, it doesn't come from nothing. Perhaps the poet's role is not one of creation so much as hearing/seeing/feeling and then directing that "quiet-flowing current". If that's true, then there are two ways (at least) of experiencing poetry, one in the initial hearing/seeing/feeling, and the other in the translation of that experience into words. Yes, translation. Exactly. I've thought this a while, that poets are translators. But also that all of us experience poems. Those moments when we stop, when we notice the clouds moving, the shadows stretching, the world turning - we are embraced within a breathing, pulsing, moving poem. "A vibration heard when life is dumb." We move within a poem, and are part of it, agents within our "form". There are words for it, yes, but the poem itself is bigger than the words. Life itself is the poem.