As You Say (Not Without Sadness), Poets Don’t See, They Feel
By Karl Shapiro
As you say, (not without sadness), poets don’t see, they feel. And that’s why people who have turned to feelers seem like poets. Why Children seem poetic. Why when the sap rises in the adolescent heart the young write poetry. Why great catastrophes are stated in verse. Why lunatics are named for the moon. Yet poetry isn’t feeling with the hands. A poem is not a kiss. Poems are what ideas feel like. Ideas on Sunday, thoughts on vacation.
Poets don’t see, they feel. They are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators. The poets go up and feel the insulators. Now and again they feel the wrong thing and are thrown through a wall by a million-volt shock. All insulation makes the poet anxious. Clothes, strait jackets, iambic five. He pulls at the seams like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half. Poets think along the electric currents. The words are constantly not making sense when he reads. He flunks economics, logic, history. Then he describes what it feels like to flunk economics, logic, history. After that he feels better.
People say: it is sad to see a grown man feeling his way, sad to see a man so naked, desireless of any defenses. The people walk back into their boxes and triple-lock the doors. When their children begin to read poetry the parents watch them from the corner of their eye. It’s only a phase, they aver. Parents like the word “aver” though they don’t use it.
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This is a re-publish I stole from somewhere I shall not say, but can if you must know. I hope you don’t mind, Karl Shapiro, one day we may workshop together.
I don’t think I need to say anything beyond the piece, unless I were to write a new piece. I wish it was on a great big poster of every poetry event in this city, this poem, then maybe- but that is too much information. Read it and read it again.
