Poetry to me is not a mode of communication in which I seek to express an experience, whether it is the experience of a happening, a thought, or an emotion. My goal, if I have one, is to express a single moment's experience in a way that that other people may then experience it.
I seek to write in things that other people look at and feel as though they've experienced them before. I want to put words to the human condition in a way that expresses my experience of the world. I love poetry that expresses not the feeling of the moment, but the experience of the moment. To me a good writer is one, that after I have read their works, I have taken a part of them and been given the chance to live through their work. One of my favorite examples of this is Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market."
Among the market greens,
a bullet
from the ocean
depths,
a swimming
projectile,
I saw you,
dead.
All around you
were lettuces,
sea foam
of the earth,
carrots,
grapes,
but
of the ocean
truth,
of the unknown,
of the
unfathomable
shadow, the
depths
of the sea,
the abyss,
only you had survived,
a pitch-black, varnished
witness
to deepest night.
Only you, well-aimed
dark bullet
from the abyss,
mangled at one tip,
but constantly
reborn,
at anchor in the current,
winged fins
windmilling
in the swift
flight
of
the
marine
shadow,
a mourning arrow,
dart of the sea,
olive, oily fish.
I saw you dead,
a deceased king
of my own ocean,
green
assault, silver
submarine fir,
seed
of seaquakes,
now
only dead remains,
yet
in all the market
yours
was the only
purposeful form
amid
the bewildering rout
of nature;
amid the fragile greens
you were
a solitary ship,
armed
among the vegetables,
fin and prow black and oiled,
as if you were still
the vessel of the wind,
the one and only
pure
ocean
machine:
unflawed, navigating
the waters of death.
When I read this I feel as though I have experienced everything he felt, thought, every sideways connection of his brain in the moment that he saw this large tuna.
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