First, there’s the world. Then, there’s poetry.
By Will Falk
Editor’s Note: Will Falk contacted San Diego Free Press back in December of 2013. He wrote that he had recently moved to San Diego and was interested in submitting essays and poetry. Since that first contact it is unusual for a week to go by without receiving a submission from Will in one genre or the other. His essays have attracted a wide readership; they are often picked up on reddit and reposted on other sites. It is often harder however for poets to discern the extent and nature of the audience for their poems. So we asked Will why his first passion is to write poetry. The response is in his poet’s manifesto below. This is Not a Poem follows.
Treatise on the Rules and Meters of Poetry
Kashmir India 1677 Author Unknown
First, there’s sunshine, clouds, empty skies, and lightning storms. First, there’s wind kissing your breast, chills chapping your lips, and dew on your sleeping bag before the dawn. First, there’s salmon swimming upstream, heron stalking bluegill, and grizzly bear brothers wrestling. First, there’s quick clean water chasing over pebbles, ice cracking under a spring sun, and sand dragging over desert floors.
First, there’s the world. Then, there’s poetry.
At least, that’s how it is for me.
What is poetry without the voice and what is the voice if not for the world that makes the voice possible? There would be no poetry without air to form the breath, without land to grow the food to form the tongue, and without water to keep the mouth wet when the poet uses her voice.
There was a time when most humans didn’t feel the need for the written word. It was a time where we recognized the primacy of the natural world and the cyclical nature of reality. Everything that happened had already happened and would happen again. So, we lacked this anxious urge to record it all.
But, then crops were planted, food stored, walls built, and the first writing came in the form of slave logs and grain records. How else would masters know what they had if they didn’t write it all down?
There are – and have always been – cultures without written systems of language. It just so happens that these cultures have often resisted the planters, slavers, and wall-builders who come for their land. In many instances, those who resist are forced to use the arms used and invented by those who seek to dominate.
Poetry is no different.
It is a tool to use in resistance. It can lead us back to our natural heritage and help us dismantle language as a system of dominance. And the beautiful thing about true poetry is that in the end it seeks to undermine its own written existence.
≈
this is not a poem, really
it’s a prayer maybe
I’m trying to listen and
once hearing to write it all down
I’m listening for rain
in places like Anza Borrego
and Joshua Tree
in places inside and outside of me
and under the famous green tower
in North Park, San Diego
where I live wondering
just what holds any water anymore
there has been a long drought
it’s not a musical drought
it’s just everything is off-key
voices are a dry river bed
the clacks of angry stones
singing dry songs
as shaming as grandfather warnings
a seagull cries in the desert
an aged gull, snow white
odd here and stark
against the brown
only to see once more
the dancing of fish
and hear their fins’ soft melodies
this is not a poem, really
it’s a prayer maybe
I’m trying to listen
through personal droughts
hoping to be washed clean
by the ringing bells
in a soft moving stream
Will Falk
Latest posts by Will Falk (see all)
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- Why Does the Colorado River Need to Sue For Rights? - September 25, 2017
The difference between prose and poetry:
Prose is not a rose: it is a bunch of sentences strung together trying to say something about the weather, or everyones’s health, or love or wealth, and although it may rhyme, by chance sometimes, as everyone knows, this is just prose.
Poetry,
One the other hand,
Is largely concerned with
White space
If
There is not
A lot
Of white space on the page,
Then,
It is not
Poetry.