The purest and most active art: poetry.
While other arts express themselves in terms of colors, sounds and narratives, poetry is purely about the potentialities of language, the relation between words, images and the nature of human speech.
“The HEAD by way of the EAR/the HEART by way of the BREATH to the LINE,” the great American poet Charles Olson said in reference to poetic meter. He states here that the line of poetry, through the way of the heartbeat and breath, prosodically relates to the human body.
Reading poetry aloud, the only real way to read it, is a bodily and intellectual practice. While watching a movie or reading a book puts the reader in a passive, reactive state, poetry engages the body through speech and allows the speaker to interpret physical aspects like tone or volume.
The frequent use of ambiguity also invites the reader to take an active role in the text. No concrete sound or visual is given to the reader and they must interpret meaning.
The interpretive aspect of poetry also allows the poet freedom.
For example, in Ezra Pound’s long poem “The Cantos,” he weaves dozens of stories, constantly cutting back and forth between different perspectives and dates. If a novel or movie did this it would be completely jarring and confusing, but in “The Cantos,” it makes the poem more dimensional.
Sadly, few read poetry and the most famous poets among the youth are Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur, who hold little depth and are a disgrace to the form.
The public needs to return to reading poetry from poets, such as Anne Carson, Ada Limon, Ezra Pound, Louise Gluck, T.S Eliot, to resist the strictness and passivity of today’s art and embrace the beautiful challenges of the artistic greatness poetry allows.
