Writing with Earth’s Elements: Part I – The Air of Poetry

Whirling Dervishes - Rumi's Religious Ecstasy

I know next to nothing about poetry. But there are times I just want to lean into its elegance, gently and firmly into the airy spaces of poetry with the weight of my intention, and like osmosis, allow my unconscious to absorb its essence. On some level this makes total sense.

For one thing, poetry almost demands that you make it your own. Many times we have no way of knowing the full intent of the poet’s expression. The best we can do is gently step in, breathe it in and settle into it, sensing rather grasping. In a way we are learning to be the poet, or learning to be the poem. That light touch is like our connection with air, intangible but vital.

The very structure of poetry has a lot of “air” in it. It’s arranged on the page with openness, the spaces between the words invite you to breathe along in its expansive rhythm. When poetry is spoken, the beauty of its cadence is found in the emphasis of the pause. I love listening to the Toni Morrison’s audio books that she herself reads. She gives them so much air that even her prose is like a poetry slam. It brings her writing to a whole new level of artistry when you can hear the space of her thoughts.

Like air, the symbols, metaphors and similes so common in poetry are intangible and illusive. We can’t box them up. We can’t box poetry up. It escapes any four walls we may try to construct to contain it.

Rumi’s poetry is rich with parables, fables, metaphors and more, all couched inside one another like nested Russian dolls, leading the reader on, in an attempt to find the kernel. In his “The Mouse and the Camel” piece Rumi gives insight into human nature through a fable story. He deepens the lesson with metaphors such as “Someone who makes a habit of eating clay” and one who is in need of becoming “an ear.”

These layers of meaning negate any attempt at arriving at a simplistic conclusion. Instead, we adjust and acclimate as we go, taking in the air as we can.

Rilke’s phrases from Duino Elegies allow us the familiar experience of “the breeze,” “the curtain” or the “teacup,” while at the same time daring us to move and sit and fly into airy spaces beyond any boundary we have previously known.

“…you who move like the morning breeze…”

Third Elegy

“Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s

curtain?”

The Fourth Elegy

“And how bewildered is any womb-born creature

that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing

from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way

a crack runs through a teacup.”

The Eighth Elegy

But perhaps Walt Whitman in his poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” best captures what I’m trying to say about Air in poetry.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mockingbird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond , where the child leaving his bed

wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the shower’d halo,

Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive…

Walt Whitman Poetry and Prose

Poetry can be a vehicle to bring our consciousness into close proximity with the element of Air, or at least that is my experience as a lay writer and armchair philosopher.

How do words supply your air?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Bareheaded and Barefoot