Poetry is written to argue with everyday perception and words, and to forcibly present things as if they didn't exist before. Some people may misunderstand, so it is wrong to take writing poetry as a symbol, and whether writing poetry simply gives objects a transcendental metaphysical meaning. Symbol is the end of a poem, not the beginning. Its beginning is observation, and its path is visualization.
After reading Rilke's poems, I will talk about Rilke's poems about things in three steps. What are the inspirations for our study and creation?
First, naive observation
What is the first question that most people who study poetry writing encounter? For poets, this question should be reversed. What can't I write? Why do poets always have endless objects to write? We don't know what to write. In a letter to a young poet, a young poet wrote to Rilke and asked him how to write a poem. Rilke's answer is:
You should be close to nature and observe life. You should practice like a primitive man and say what you have seen, experienced, loved and lost.
You should avoid those common themes and return to what your daily life presents to you.
Pay attention to what everyday life presents to you. In other words, the object of poetry is what you see, hear and feel in your daily life. Aren't these things everywhere?
But isn't everything we see everyday monotonous? Rilke added that you should practice speaking like a primitive man. I think we should not only practice speaking, but also practice observation like primitive people. The reason why daily life is monotonous is only because we look at it with daily eyes. If you look at it differently, it will be different.
The primitive man mentioned by Rilke refers to the primitive man without any knowledge and experience. He only has five senses: eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body. Imagine that if we don't know that a cup is a cup, that it is made of glass, that it is a container for holding water, and only touch it with our senses, it will certainly convey a lot of information to us, and there is always some of this information. It is obscured by our daily cognition.
But this information belongs to things, it is a part of things. These aspects of things covered by daily knowledge are exactly what poetry wants to reveal. When we dive into life and observe things one by one, life will inevitably show you its unknown side, and this is where poetry lies. So Rilke warned the young poet:
If you think your daily life is poor,
Don't complain about it;
Blame yourself,
I hope you are not a poet enough to call.
The treasure of life.
In connection with what has been said before, we can draw a conclusion. Learning to observe is the first step in writing poetry.
Second, the description of unfamiliar words.
We got the object of poetry writing from observation. In other words, it contains some secret and real things. The next step is to describe this kind of thing and convey its secret truth to others and readers. The meaning conveyed here is not informing, not introducing, but visualizing. In fact, what we get from observation is not a signal, not something that can be said in conceptual language, but an experience. Observing that we capture the information of things with our senses, that information must also exist in a perceptual way, just like most people say, it is an intuitive and unexplained feeling.
If poetry wants to convey this kind of thing, it must not be in a conceptual way, but in a visual way. What is visualization? The first two paragraphs of Rilke's Leopard are the best examples of visual description. Imagine that when we observe a leopard in a cage, we must look inside through the fence from the outside. This is a daily watch. Rilke's description of leopards has never set out from this angle.
In the first paragraph, it seems that he got into the cage and followed the leopard to perceive the situation blocked by the iron fence. In the second paragraph, he didn't seem to see the existence of the iron fence at all. The leopard's fight turned into a voluntary dance, which seems to be not the result of the iron fence constraint at all. These two kinds of observation are different from the daily eyes through the iron bars, and they are strange and imaginative eyes.
From a daily perspective, a leopard longing for freedom. Because of the barrier, this sentence covers the contents of the first two sections. But it can never convey the feeling that the author wants to write. If you want to convey this feeling, you must imagine rotation. Because of the railing, you have to look at it with eyes that seem incomprehensible.
In the first section, leopards don't understand railings. In its view, the railing is an endless wall, not a circle. In the second quarter, the poet didn't see the railing at all, only saw the leopard, which visualized the rotating movement. We don't know that the leopard is spinning, but we see that the leopard is spinning, so the visualization comes from the singularity. The word singularity. Russian formalism theorist Kraffszky translated some books into defamiliarization. Shklovsky said:
"Where there are images, there are singularities."
"The purpose of image is not to make the meaning of [things] easy for us to understand, but to create a special feeling of things, that is, to produce' vision' rather than' cognition'."
Combined with our observation mentioned above, naive observation of things is the first step in writing poetry, and describing things strangely is the second step in writing poetry. The effect of the two steps is the same, both of which require us to liberate things from the darkness that we turn a blind eye to and make it shocking.
Third, the poetic pace of jumping
With the object of writing poetry and the method of description, the next step is to organize poetry. No matter how many lines and stanzas a poem has, it is a complete expression. Simply put, it is a complete sentence, the only difference is that some are long and some are short. Through the March of the poem, the meaning of the poem is expressed. Then, when writing poetry, we must understand that the basic footwork of poetry is jumping.
When we go back to Rilke's Leopard, we can see that the poem is divided into three paragraphs. Between the first and second sections, there is a small jump in perspective, but both sections are written around leopards, and the repetition of this theme itself needs an explanation. So the third quarter suddenly turned to tense silence through the limbs, which is a detail that ordinary people can't see. Written in the leopard's heart, this is completely invisible, this is jumping.
The strength of this leap lies in writing, and it disappears in my heart through the tense silence of my limbs. Only then did we know the profound meaning of leopard rotation. This is the mechanical movement of a tragic hero, the numbing rotation of a fallen king, and the throb of a body whose heart is dead but not yielding.
This change from visible to invisible, from result to cause is a leap in poetry. This leap has achieved the power of poetry, making things visual and presenting them with meaningful weight. Do you think, if there is no such jumping structure, if we put the third verse in front and in the position of the first verse, will the power of this poem be weakened? There is no doubt that from the perspective of a poem as a complete expression, semantic stress is generally put last, and of course no exception is excluded. We say most short poems, and the movements of most short poems are similar to Rilke's Leopard. It is a descriptive and repetitive foreshadowing part, with two beats and jumping to a central idea.
And this central idea can explain the previous descriptions and give them new and profound significance. Today we studied a great poet and read a great poem. Then talk about some introductory topics of poetry writing from three aspects: observation, description and poetic lines.
Leave an exercise at last. Please imitate the leopard in Rilke, and write a poem about an event in daily life.