What Is Poetry? - by Zohar Atkins - What Is Called Thinking?
The Greek meaning of poem just means “made thing.” Poiesis is the activity of forming or shaping something. In Hebrew, there are two words for creation, briah and yetzirah, the former referring to creation ex nihilo and the latter to the creation of something from something else. Poetry corresponds to this second kind of creation; it is the art of revision, gathering, separation. First, God says, “Let there be light.” Next, God separates light from dark. A poem separates itself from the world in which it lives, draws a line on the page. A poem draws attention to the margins where it ends.
For Heidegger, the original meaning of poetry is not making, but revealing. Making is derivative of revealing. To equate a poem with making is already to think the poem in terms of technology. But a poem is that which lets things be, while technology lets things be—used, exploited, leveraged. Poetry and technology are two sides of the same coin, but only poetry lets us realize this, lets us see the poetry in technology (while technology says of the poem, “What is this garbage?”) Is the Brooklyn Bridge poetic? Is O’Hare airport? Is an iPad? SpaceX? Self-driving cars? Can we really divide things between poetic and non-? Are not Steve Jobs and Elon Musk doing for tech what O’Hara and Ashbery did for poems, namely, effacing the boundary between sacred and profane? For the poets, poetry became a casual endeavor, while for the technologists, tech became a religion. Apple Stores look like modernist cathedrals.
A poem reveals that revelation is always accompanied by hiding. A poem makes us acutely aware of what cannot be known, makes us intimate with the unsayable. The prosaic does not give us such intimacy. It makes us think (erroneously) that mystery doesn’t exist or that we have explained it. In the kettle logic of the anti-poetic, there is nothing to grasp and we have grasped it.
