For our founding publisher, Peter Kidd (1947-2020), poetry was metaphysical theatre. The poem was a space for the shadows of spiritual beings and ideas to engage with one another. Growing up in post-WWII America, dropping out of Columbia University and boarding a freighter for the north-east of Africa, falling in with occultists from a young age, our founder was not unaware of the American scylla of atheism and charybdis of fundamentalism. He learned from each one, weaving his own metaphysic with members of each camp, exploring the grey areas and listening to people speak and read their poetry aloud.
One of Igneus’ most supportive community members, with 7 titles published with Igneus over the years, Richard Martin‘s philosophical exploration in poetry skirts theological questions, turning humor into a metaphysic all on its own. In a conversation not long after our founder’s passing, I learned that Martin viewed small press as his ‘church.’ His moral, financial, and literary contributions to Igneus are a form of tithing, so to speak, to the best in humanity. Peter Kidd often referred to his role in small press publishing as a form of ‘tithing,’ that is, giving a small portion of one’s income to a local ‘church.’
Then there is metaphysical poetry. This type of poetry in the Western tradition is intellectual, uses strange incongruous imagery, frequent paradox, and is often highly conceptual. The British tradition of metaphysical poetry gave rise to transcendentalism in 19th century American poetry. Other influences of transcendentalism, and also of metaphysical poetry were Platonism and NeoPlatonism, Indian and Chinese scriptures, and the writings of various occultists such as Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Boehme. Beliefs of transcendentalist writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller cultivated a sense of idealism, of the basic goodness of human beings, and the importance of insight over logic.
Igneus has always published books in this vein, providing a platform to poets who share a “compassion and concern for the human condition” (our mission tagline). I think it would be safe to say that, since 1989, Igneus has been cultivating a cell of writers who take up and pass down to posterity the flame of, first, metaphysical poets, and, later, transcendentalists. Of course, there’s been proliferation of style and influence, but the idea is basically the same…
Meaning is always busting out of its container, be that container a word, sentence, poem, context, or genre. This is the main point of metaphysics in poetry–that there is more to the world than what we perceive with our senses, and more to express than can be expressed in language. So we must find magical ways of ‘tricking out’ the remainder of what we witness, think, say, write, and mean.
What are your thoughts, dear reader? What is the relationship between metaphysics and poetry? Leave your comments down below, or on our social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram), and we’ll enter you in our March contest for a free book of your choice from the Igneus catalog.
POETRY AND METAPHYSICS
METAPHYSICS
“From Medieval Latin metaphysica, neuter plural of Medieval Greek (ta) metaphusika, from Greek ta meta ta physika ‘the (works) after the Physics,’ title of the 13 treatises which traditionally were arranged after those on physics and natural sciences in Aristotle’s writings. The name was given c.70 B.C.E. by Andronicus of Rhodes, and was a reference to the customary ordering of the books, but it was misinterpreted by Latin writers as meaning ‘the science of what is beyond the physical.’”
Meta-
“Word-forming element of Greek origin meaning 1. ‘after, behind; among, between,’ 2. ‘changed, altered,’ 3. ‘higher, beyond’…The third, modern sense, ‘higher than, transcending, overarching, dealing with the most fundamental matters of,’ is due to misinterpretation of metaphysics as ‘science of that which transcends the physical.’ This has led to a prodigious erroneous extension in modern usage.”
Physics
“From physic in sensed of ‘natural science.’ Also see -ics. Based on Latin physica (neuter plural), from Greek ta physika, literally ‘the natural things,’ title of Aristotle’s treatise on nature. The current restricted sense of ‘science treating of properties of matter and energy’ is from 1715.”
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so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
––William Carlos Williams
There is a story that Dr. Williams was attending a patient who died. Exhausted and frustrated, Williams looked out the man’s window and, seeing his tools, thought, “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow (two words, sic) glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.”
I don’t know whether the story is true, but it is clearly an attempt to explain, to place in some sort of context the phrase “so much depends / upon.”
If we take the term “metaphysics” in its modern, “prodigious erroneous extension”––“the science of what is beyond the physical”––what Williams is doing here becomes much clearer. Exactly “what” depends on the objects named in the poem is never given. We don’t know exactly what it is: it remains a mystery, an enigma. But the point of the poem is that something––something “beyond”––depends upon these physical objects. Williams’ poem is not about the usefulness of tools and the desirability of owning chickens. It is not even about the death of a patient. It is about the transformation of physical objects into something beyond themselves. The wheel barrow, the rain water, the chickens as such are the stuff of an Imagist poem. But Williams goes beyond the descriptive elements of Imagism and forces us to see these objects in a new light, as things upon which “so much” depends. Exactly what constitutes this dependence doesn’t matter: the point is, as Williams puts it in “by the road to the contagious hospital” (another famous poem from Spring and All)––the point is that “the profound change / has come upon them”; they “begin to awaken.” In William’s poem, so much depends upon “so much depends / upon.” That the poem is, uncharacteristically, a formal poem (each stanza is three words followed by one) gives it something of the quality of prayers, formal structures that are constantly repeated in the same way. The poem’s sixteen words stay in the mind, haunting us by their enigmatic quality. Whatever the things they refer to may “mean,” they have awakened from the sleep of being mere objects.
Recently, I wrote this:
I don’t think universal vs. personal is a real issue. That dichotomy arises out of the notion of the “individual,” which is understood to be separated from everything, whereas in fact people are infinitely connected––to the world, to each other, to everything. Language reflects this. Listened to carefully––as we do in poetry––it is constantly moving beyond itself: it refuses to be isolated. It leaps out of the limited context in which we first encounter it like a rabbi out of a hat; we sing in dubious ecstasy.
And this:
––Poetry in the sense I mean it is not so much self-expression as it is liberation from the notion of the self, though “self-expression” may be an element in it. It connects us to a larger, more expansive consciousness which differs from our ordinary state. Language can accomplish this transformation because language itself has this kind of being. Words may be separated out, contemplated as “individual” entities, yet they are fundamentally in a state of connectedness to all other words, through grammar, through sound, through etymology, through the thousands of contexts in which we encounter them. In how many contexts have we seen the word “love”? Once we open ourselves to it, language IS that more expansive consciousness, which is why poetry—always in love with language, always “caught in the web of words”—can bring us to the deep awareness (perhaps the deep fiction) of the interconnectedness of all things.
And this:
Transform yourself
Cry the butterflies
Transform yourself
Cry the trees
Transform yourself
Cry the rivers
That change constantly
As they move to the sea
Transform yourself
It is what you are made of
There is no glue that can hold you
No prison that can keep you or finalize you
You are night, day (diurnally they change!), a feather in the wind,
The light in the window of the dark, unfinished house
To put it another way: for me, “poetry” is precisely the experience of words moving beyond themselves whether they do it in the literary form of “verse” or in the literary form of “prose.” When we read Yeats’ poem, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” we know that these are real swans existing in a real place. Yet we also know that these swans are souls and that the words “They paddle in the cold / Companionable streams or climb the air” refer us back to an ancient essay by Porphyry which has to do with birth and death, with a “place” which is nowhere in this world.