The Poet's Journey from the Beautiful to the Ethical

To a younger poet. Today in speaking of the art of writing poetry, I would like to lead my reader in a progression which starts in self-pity and ends in beauty and fellow feeling.

The journey from narcissism to compassion is an ethical journey which we poets hopefully are able to make as we struggle with poetic themes and forms (which efforts hopefully result in finished poems).

First I learned to be a reader of poems to learn what this struggle is about. Struggle if you must to understand the poem, but persist. You want to be a poet, then study poems, said the older poets.

As a teenager beginning to write poems, I stood in the way of the poems for I had limited experiences of life and language. Also, as a modern youth, aware and alert, I was tempted by an easy cynicism. However, what was required of this youth who would be a poet, was to slow down and pay attention to beauty. Cynicism is much like seeing a wart on a beauty queen's nose. Realism teaches us to see that perfect ear lobe on a rat. Eventually, I started seeing beauty in human and animal conduct (not just nature).

To write of of what I saw and felt did not come easy for me for a reason. I was self-absorbed. This self-absorption put another way was my attempt to make sense of my life. Now looking back I see I had a quest to give meaningfulness to my life.

How? For starters I sought meaning in poems I at first didn't understand but wanted to get. Later, I grasped I had to grapple with my art. I subjected "the self" that I was to a discipline, the discipline of making a poem. At first this discipline was about lucidity (learning grammar, diction, and rhetoric along the way, devices of sound, and then later about imagery and symbolism).

My discussion here is not so much about right and wrong options for the poet, but about arriving at a vibrant imagination for the poet as he or she lives life while surrounded by the absurd and ridiculous conditions of modernity. Out of chaos comes order if the poem and ultimately the poetry succeeds.

Some questions for reflection:

1. Must a poem escape the solipsism of its author? As a poet reflects on his subjective feeling, he knows it is not an end in itself. In our own little world, we might as well be a sovereign as a pauper. The monarch or the pauper are similar if they can not transcend the specific conditions that defines one. So, yes, a poem hopefully does escape the solipsism of its author. See additional content below.

2. How does poetry escape solipsism? Poetry can appeal to common experience and the human condition, When it does this, it may do it inspite of warped perceptions and half-truths embraced by the persona in the poem. Irony is a sure curative for solipsism.

3. Will a focus on objective reality (objectivism ) be the antithesis of the poetic in language and art? Unavoidably. Report writing is not poetry. A poet does what he can of course to exploit the physical world for his or her purposes. The creation of symbols and the making of fresh similes and metaphors are the products of attending to objective reality. Poets, whether sounding idealists or realists, most often wish to speak a common language known and accessible to readers, but they must harness word choice to the plow of a poetic purpose. Which is not to say poets do not bring unfamiliar words to bear and even invent words when called to do so by the context of a poem or passage.

The Poetic Goal is the Finished Poem
I am drawn to the hard nut of a poem but I am not enamored by a hard nut. A scientist should be more interested in the hard nut than I. I am a poet. There is for me only the apt comparison of a poem to a hard nut.

I expect a successful poem to be more than the sum of its parts, more than the words on the page or its images, more than the arrangement of words or the rhythm of the language. Organic verse or poetry is quite simply found where the language used is so successful that it has a life of its own free and clear of the poet or writer who wrote the verse.

The fact that a poem has rhythmical argument or consequential rhyme is a fact that argues for effective emphasis. Yet, neither rhythm nor rhyme is definitive in creating poetry. These techniques are merely circumstantial and hopefully effective in making the poetic argument of the specific poem itself.

In my maturity as a poet I came to write some poems which I knew were finished. In some poems, I quickly channel poetic inspirations into words; in others I labored for a time as a fine tuner. A poem for me is finished because it now has a life of its own. Here is such a poem:

Aurora in her waking

Arise, arise, intercept him we can,
The winged herald with a morning song,
And put our feet with his in the narrow
Twilight of a soon to triumph Sun.

You, still abed, cradled rocked by sleep,
Soon to careen into the minions of the Sun,
Will you ever seek her of the unseen visage?
No! Then slip back to repose. I’ll go

Catch the advance, her rosy invasion,
Which always in a quickening retreat,
Precedes the return of her sender,
And receive what she freely dispenses.


In the above poem, the persona is singular and addresses another but is not heard. The persona is left to experience the dawn on his or her own. The sacred is quite often encountered in isolation and without the trappings of court and counsel. I consider this poem neo-classical in its ageless rendition of how one is stirred by the transitions prior to, during, and after sunrise or sunset. As the poet I knew the feelings of the persona in this poem and wholely relate to the common experience the poem encapsulates.

The Experience Giving Rise to a Poem

As a young poet, I quite often created poems that were not of my experience. I had an active imagination. Living day to day dealing with actual human conflict changed me. In fairness to my younger self, poems can certainly be premised on an fictional narration of events. However, a fiction is satisfying because it is reflective of reality and insightful of the human condition. I know that the art of creation does give rise to imagined experiences the poet himself or herself never actually has had or even dreamed necessarily. I want to share a poem with you and speak a little of how the poem did grow out of my experience but came to take on a life of its own (once I allowed this to happen in my poetic maturity).


Inland, a child burial

Little girl, as full
As this the soil sea,
Holds a starfish shell
And reasons she died.

Why had we unearthed
Her ancient village?
Had we learned anything
About origin?

What I can only
Surmise of her grasp
Is that star she holds
Was to guide her way.

This uncommon find,
This shell, lends insight:
We’re wave washed
Into an afterlife.

This particular poem, a panegyric, has a persona that is not me in any biographical sense as I am not an archeologist or paleontologist. There is not known to me any such skeletal find as this poem reports. Regardless, I believe that the symbols of an afterlife are pervasive across human experience.

I do not consider this a false poem. It captures the persistant archetypes of life before this life we now live and life after this life we now live. Is it a romantic notion that life is persistant and ultimately can not be rubbed out by death? Yes. Does that truth of the human psyche define us as human? I believe it does.

In objective reality the scientist would look at that starfish encrusted in the remains of the skeleton and not conclude any spiritual or transcendental reality. The human experience though is to celebrate our kinship with those who go before us. They may be dead, but they are with us yet. It remains for us to determine in what ways that is true. This poem for me celebrates our common humanity across the generations.

The Narcissism of the Human Condition

One of the things for which I am grateful, is the awareness of my place in the human comedy. I for one have taken my self and at times my misfortunes too seriously. In poetry I found a release for inflation of the self's troubles (commonly known as self pity). I believe that solipsism (subjective reality) is the very root of lyrical poetry. However, humor or some other disposition such as irony is required to make the lyric more than some report of a self-immolation. I for one as this poem hopefully demonstrates to you am the beneficiary of the very poems I have written and ultimately let go of as finished poems, for example this one in which beauty in nature provides the curative for an isolated adolescent:

Island shadows of noon

Now is my time to be a still watcher
Beneath the cottonwoods
While the people of this city
Are about each other’s business.

I am the king of my world and
Lord of all I survey; and round
About me the sun is spinning
A royal cloak of whitest cotton.

You can see me, majestically
Reclining on my park bench,
With squirrels around and about me
Acting as if I were invisible to them.

Now is the summertime sure
When can be seen a stray
Digging apart the clover
To rub its body in the loam.

Lovers behind the war memorial,
Not too concerned with being seen,
Make passersby blush or scold and
Been yet about their fierce grappling.

Now, as the clouds pass by in parade,
The stamen souls of leaves
Sail on breezes; fall like snow
In my island shadows of noon.


Here the persona is able to able to accept relation to small animals even if alienated from his human community and detached towards the lovers. The relief for the persona from his feigned self-importance is in nature's own celebration of life itself from which the persona can not ultimately remain alienated. This poem is not philosophical but I believe it does persist in providing the reader with the context of a home for all of us even in our most isolated moments in the natural world that surrounds us. Poetry remarkably can provide us solace and comfort too as a reminder of the natural world in which we are nested and upon which we must rely to live. That is the source of beauty or what we humans recognize as the beautiful.

Richard J. Hilber.

Is Anyone Out There?

Are we lost in space? Are we alone in the Universe? Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe (by intelligent life, I mean conscious individuals that both think and feel as we do)? I for one believe it is supported as a statistical likelihood that there is such life out there. However, the likelihood we can communicate with others in the vastness of space seems unlikely in our life times. [See website of Dr. Stephen Hawkings: http://www.hawking.org.uk/; Dr. Hawkings a deep thinker to say the least has some interesting views on life in the universe; at his website see specifically his presentation on "Life in the Universe."]
Personally, I can not envision intelligent life lacking consciousness of a "self" and capacity not only to think, but to feel. However, that just starts the trouble. What if this intelligent life is self-centered and self-destructive. Cynically, all things being possible, let's say there is intelligent life but it's more bent on destruction than we humans of the planet Earth?
I'm thinking of the automobile manufacturers who destroyed electric cars which had been leased out in California in time to make a deadline. Turns out the battery providing greater distance driving had been bought up by an oil company! The cars were shredded over the protest of leaseholders who wanted to buy the cars and keep them running. See reviews of Who Killed the Electric Car at various websites.