Poetry today is the higher algebra of metaphor
                                                Ortega y Gasset

…Poetry is thinking, real thinking. And real thinking is poetry.

     Herakleitos says something that might help us get this clear:  “All things think and are linked 
together by thinking.” Parmenides answers him in verse: “To be and to have meaning are the same.” 
These are concise definitions of poetry and brief explanations of how it has come to exist. Poetry 
is not manmade; it is not pretty words; it is not something hybridized by humans on the farm 
of human language. Poetry is a quality or aspect of existence. It is the thinking of things.
    Language is one of the methods we use to mime and to mirror and admire it, and for that 
reason poetry, as mirrored in human language, has come to be taught in the English Department. 
They know at least as much about poetry in the Physics and Biology departments, and in the 
Mathematics and Music departments, but there they always call it by different names. If they 
are really old fashioned they might even call it Truth or Beauty. If they are really up to date, 
they will never use such words, and the silence they put in their place is the name they use 
for poetry. Those who are really up to date in the English Department now and then still mention 
poetry. But all they mean by poetry is poems. Poems are the tips of the icebergs afloat on the 
ocean of poetry. But poetry continues to exist, maybe even to thrive, whether or not we deny 
or misdefine it.
     The obnoxious and contrary beings called poets have been around for quite some time—
about three million years, if you think that poets are restricted to the genus Homo; maybe closer t
o three hundred thousand years, if you think they’re restricted to the species Homo sapiens. 
Poetry itself has been here a lot longer—as long, I suppose, as things have been thinking and 
dreaming themselves, which might be as long as things have existed, or maybe somewhat longer.
     Poetry, of course, has many names in many languages. Its English name comes, as you know, 
from Greek, from the verb [poiéo, poieîn] which means to do or to make. In early Greek, poieîn isn’t 
a word used for feeble-bodied creatures sitting at desks with pencil and paper; poieîn is what 
carpenters and ironworkers do. It’s the verb the Homeric poets use to talk about making a sword 
or ploughshare or building a house.
     Does that imply that poetry is made by human beings? That it only exists because of us? I think, 
myself, that making and doing are activities we share with all the other animals and plants and 
with plenty of other things besides. The wind on the water makes waves, the interaction of the 
earth and sun and moon make tides, sun coming up and going on the water and the air makes 
clouds, and clouds make rain, and the rain makes rivers, and rivers feed the lakes and other rivers 
and the sea from which the sun keeps making clouds, and there is plenty of poetry in that, whether 
or not there are any human beings here to say in iambic pentameter or rhyming alexandrines that 
they see it and approve.
      With a few notorious exceptions, all the mammals and all the birds—that is, tens of thousands 
of species—train their young. This means they take an active part in defining who and what they 
really are. It means that they—I should say we, we birds and mammals—have two kinds of heredity: 
genetic and exogenetic. One is based securely in the body; the other is more perilously rooted in 
the mind.
     These two kinds of heredity are as different as the hard disk and the RAM in your computer. The 
part that is written to the genes is like the part that is written to disk. It can be easily corrupted or 
destroyed, but it comes with a kind of insurance. It exists in multiple copies, in the bodies of other 
human beings. That’s the back-up: other human beings, other members of the same living species. 
The part that is not genetic is always at risk. That’s the cultural part. As soon as you turn off the 
ower—as soon as you pull the plug on any society, any band, any village, any tribe, any language, 
any family, any group of social animals—humans, wolves, moose, whales or whiskeyjacks, or any 
other species that trains and raises its young—as soon as you wreck its social organization, the cultural 
part of its heredity is torn to smithereens. 
     Humans have always, evidently, had a knack for tearing their own and each other’s cultures to 
shreds, but we have done it in recent times on an unprecedented scale, using everything from microbes 
to missionaries, atomic bombs to residential schools, machetes to law books. Nothing—not even 
religion—has proven more effective in this regard than the gilded weapons of advertising and commerce.
     So the cultural floor is a killing floor, and it’s littered with smithereens. Reach down and you might 
pick up some fragments of a Presocratic philosopher, a Zen master’s wink preserved in amber, a story 
or two told by an aboriginal elder, or a sheaf of poems by one of the great poets who go by the name 
Anonymous. You’ll have to sift through a lot of rubbish to find these treasures, but plenty of treasure is 
there: much more lying in the dust than you are likely to find in the superstructure. That’s why every 
true intellectual alive in the present day is a garbage picker.
     Even if humans were good to each other, cultures would break down. Cultures are mortal. If no 
one kills them, they die from old age, or from earthquake, floods, volcanic eruptions, or inexorable 
changes in the weather.
     So long as the earths survives, humans can start over and build themselves a culture from the 
ground. But the ground is a considerable start. Every human culture is really just an extension of 
the underlying culture known as nature.
     About 1,500 years ago, a young scholar from the east coast of China, whose name was Liú Xié, 
wrote a book he called  “The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.” In the  opening chapter 
is a sentence I have loved and pondered for some time. The sentence is, 
                                    rì yuè shān chuān  cî gài daò  zhī  wén  yê
          “sun and moon, mountains and rivers, these are really the wèn of dào.”
Wén is the Chinese word for pattern, for culture, and for literature or writing. And dào is one 
of the few Chinese words most English speakers know, if only because they have heard of the 
Taoist masters Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and of Lao Tzu’s book the Tao Te Ching.
     Daó (written Tao in the old missionary spelling, but always pronounced with a d) means way
or path or street or road. It is not a mystical term: you see it on street signs and maps all over 
China and Japan. But in Chinese philosophical tradition, daó, the Way, suggests the natural, 
inevitable way. The way of hot air is to rise; the way of water is to boil when hot, freeze when 
cold, and run down hill when liquid: the way of the mountain goat is to climb on the cliffs and 
eat grass: the way of the grizzly is to eat berries and fish in the summer and to hibernate in winter. 
In a still more general sense, daó means something like reality, truth or existence. So what 
does it mean to be the wén of daó? It means to be the language and writing of being, the culture 
of nature, the poem of the world itself. The culture of nature is the culture all other earthly cultures 
are a part of: the culture of the whole which none of the parts can do without.
     Sun, moon, mountains and rivers are the writing of being, the literature of what is. Long before 
our species was born, the books had been written. The library was here before we were. We live 
in it. We can add to it, or we can try: we can also subtract from it. We can chop it down, incinerate
 it, strip mine it, poison it, bury it under our trash. But we didn’t create it, and if we destroy it, we 
cannot replace it. Literature, culture, pattern aren’t man-made. The culture of the Tao is not man-
made, and the culture of humans is not man-made; it is just the human part of the culture of the
 whole.
     When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. 
If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, 
it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. 
But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
     Simone Weil wrote something once in her notebook about the purpose of works of art, and the 
purpose of words: “Their function is to testify, after the fashion of blossoming apple trees and stars.” 
When words do what blossoming apple trees do, and what stars do, poetry is what you read or hear.
     Aristotle called this process mimesis. This has been translated as “imitation,” but participation would 
be closer. It is imitation in the culturally significant sense of the word, the sense in which children 
imitate their elders and apprentices their master. Mimesis means learning by doing. And words, as 
Weil reminds us, are not just poker chips that are used for passing judgments or passing exams. Words 
are the tracks left by the breath of the mind as it intersects with the breath of the lungs. Words are 
for shining, like apple blossoms, like stars, giving a sign that life is lived here too, that thought is 
happening here to, among the human beings, just as it is out there in the orchard and up there 
in the sky, and in the forest, in the oceans, in the mountains, where no humans are around.
     Some people are led to the writing of poetry — or to painting, dance or music — on the promise 
that it will allow them to “express themselves.” Insofar as you are a part of the older, richer, larger 
and more knowledgeable whole we call the world, and insofar as you are a student or apprentice 
of that world, expressing yourself could well be worth the time and trouble it involves. But if it is 
really only your self that you are interested in, I venture to think that performing someone else’s 
poem - reciting it or reading it aloud - is likely better medicine than writing. Poetry, like science, 
is a way of finding out — by trying to state perceptively and clearly — what exists and what is 
going on. That is too much for the self to handle. That is why, when you go to work for the poem, 
you give yourself away. Composing a poem is a way of leaving the self behind and getting involved 
in something larger.
     I remember reading a letter that Weil wrote from Casablanca in 1942, trying to explain why, after 
she’d embraced the central doctrines of Christianity, she still refused to join the church. This is what 
she said:

The degree of intellectual probity required of me, by reason of my own vocation, demands that 
my thought remain indifferent to all ideas, bar none…Water is indifferent in this way to objects that fall 
into it. The water does not weigh them, it is they who weigh themselves after bobbing up and down 
a little while.

     Poetry will weigh you too, I guess, if you give yourself to poetry. But taking the measure of the self 
is not the same as self expression. The reason for writing poetry is that poetry knows more than any 
of us who write it.
     Poetry is what I start to hear when I concede the world’s ability to manage and to understand itself. 
It is the language of the world: something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention, and 
something that the world will teach us to speak, if we allow the world to do so. It is the wén of dào: 
a music the we learn to see, to feel, to hear, to smell, and then to think, and then to answer. But not 
to repeat. Mimesis is not repetition.
     One way of answering that music is to sing. Humans, like birds, are able to make songs and pass 
them on. Human songs, like bird songs, are part nature and part culture, part genetic predilection,
 part cultural inheritance or training, part individual inflection or creation. These are the three parts 
of mimesis. If the proportion of individual creation in human song is greater than in birdsong, that’s 
no cause for pride, though it may be very good cause for excitement. What it means is that nature 
and culture both are at greater risk from us than they are from birds.
     Another way of answering the music of the world is, of course, by telling stories. This is the most 
ancient and widespread of all philosophical methods. But story, like song, is not a genre that humans 
invented. Story is an essential part of language, a basic part of speech, just like the sentence, only 
larger. Words make sentences, sentences make stories, and stories make up a still larger part of speech, 
called a mythology. These are essential tools of thinking. The story is just as indispensable to thinking 
as the sentence.
     People have tried to tell me that language is the source and basis of poetry. I’m pretty sure that’s 
backwards. Language is what thought and poetry produce. And stories are the fruit that language 
bears. You and I are stories told in ribonucleic acid. The Iliad is a story told in Greek. Stories are pretty 
ingenious at getting themselves told.
     Plato, for good reason, tells his myths, his stories, through the mouth of a non-writer, Sokrates. 
This is a link to the older tradition of narrative philosophy, now ignored in a lot of the places where 
philosophy is taught. If you enter into a truly oral culture, you find that almost all philosophical 
works are narrative. The primary way—and maybe the only way — of doing sustained and serious 
philosophy in an oral culture is by telling stories…