The Claw of Archimedes

The Possession of Knowledge

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Full Podcast Style Audio

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Photo by J.Millard

As awareness tries to ensnare you in the net of understanding,
meaning remains the bird that eludes the realm of speech.

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
18th Century Indian Poet- commonly known as Ghalib and Asad

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Plans are never perfect. Goals are ideas. As the Boss poetically asked in The River, “is a dream a lie if it don’t come true” - or - “is it something worse”? Maybe goals end in expectations yet dreams never die? Is a plan the priest that marries them? I live into the questions. My dream is to be aware of being. My goal was to finish a poetic essay on What Are Poets For. My plan was to be finished by the end of August.

It is September. I am not finished the poetic essay. It is in a rewrite! Creativity has continued to find me in other ways and has expressed herself through me in other words. Some I share here today. I smile at where the paths and streams have carried me this past month. Louise Gluck found me through Stan Dragland who found me through Don McKay who found me through the brilliant heArt and soul of Will Johnson, who writes here on Substack at Fenland Musings. Will shares my love and quest to be bathed in the mythopoetic of word. Will would be what Malcom Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point would refer to as a Maven. Mavens are sources of information and curiosity. In a sense they are guides. Will Johnson is one of my guides to transformation. Over the past year Will has shared some Canadian poets with me that lean into the cadence of wilderness. Ironically some of these very writers had lived in and had written from the Antler River of my own Canadian hometown and its close surroundings . There are no coincidences. I can feel their words in my bones.

Ecopoetry. These writers are looking to speak to a sense of belonging in this world and coming to the realization that language can only take them so far. Language at best can only reach for the essence of that belonging. Language reaches yet it may never be able to tell us the whole story. Poetry may be our best chance and un-naming may be the true authentic door into presence. Echoing the writing of Tim Lilburn, we may never know our world in the way that poetry desires to intimately know it. Don Domanski gives me goosebumps as he says, “Poetry helps to enhance and deepen our experience of existence, not just by the use of words, but by the fact that despite their use, something else is carried along with them.” Something else is carried along with the words. Don McKay writes that metaphor’s first act is to un-name its subject. McKay cautions that the act of naming can lead to a feeling of possession. Knowledge has an instinct to possess. Language must go beyond itself. The wilderness is unnameable. Poetry may just be a pause in the presence of that other-ness. A rift in time. A glimpse of soul.

I will give Louise Gluck the final words as she beautifully wrote in her essay The Education of the Poet. She shared, “The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by will.” Now that dream is not a lie.

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The Claw of Archimedes

In a rift
deep time stares out from naked rock
Stripped of her soil
in the wild frenzy of a landslide
The glaciers left only the bones behind
We build a campfire around it
Inside the circle
Meaning evades the realm of speech
Language persuades itself to pause
The crackling of presence
conceals the sound
of knowledge and understanding
Pushing in on the moment
Trying hard to name
what they crave
to possess

© Jamie Millard

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A “poet” may just be an aspiration and an affliction as opposed to an occupation. A poet may never exist in the Archimedean Eureka of the claw of mastery. I lean into un-naming and un-taming the word. With that said, What Are Poets For? Will Johnson asked me, what would nature want to be called? The journey has always been to be lost in the spaces around the words never lost in the words themselves. Tolstoy said the most powerful warriors are patience and time. He forgot poetry. On the wings of words. Stay tuned….

The full podcast style audio is found under the main titles if you would love to listen along.

Lots of Love
Jamie

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Resources

1. Tim Lilburn

   Living in the World. Xylem Books,1999.

2. Bruce Springsteen

   The River. Song. Album: The River, 1980.

3. Stan Dragland (The Ultimate Canadian Literary Maven)

   The Bricoleur & His Sentences. Pedlar Press, 2014.

4. Don McKay

   Interview with Padraig O’Tuama, 2024.

   Griffin Poetry Prize- Lifetime Achievement

5. Don Domanski

   Selected Poems. Xylem Books, 2022.

6. Louise Gluck

   Th Education of the Poet Essay

   A lecture delivered in 1989

   Reprinted in Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Carcanet, 1999.

7. Malcom Gladwell
   The Tipping Point. Back Bay Books, 2002.