I know in the past few weeks I have been casually talking about Feel First for each of these poems. I know we have some new readers, or people who have not read in a while. I want to recap and explicitly practice Feel First for each of you.
So, what is Feel First?
Feel First is my personal insistence that the meaning of the poem is found through the creation of an experience. A poet is not trying to write a theme or message in the code of fancy language. We are not all about that. The idea is that the poet wants to conjure some images, invoke some memories, spark the imagination, and create an experience.
The reader then creates meaning from this experience. The meaning can be different for each person. If the experience is the sound of a gunshot. A soldier will have a different meaning than a gangster who will have a different experience from a toddler. The poet just creates the experience. Feel First is the practice of getting feeling out of our emotional and imaginative experiences rather than some semantic scavenger hunt.
So here are the steps of Feel First:
1. Read the poem.
2. Focus on conjuring the images and sensations in your mind
3. Connect these to memory or project them into the realm of the imagination.
4. Reread the poem and identify key words or phrases that are conjuring these images and sensations.
5. Ask yourself how what happens in the poem, how the poet conjures this imagery, and your previous or imagined experiences are connected.
That seems like a lot. However, I would shorten it into this: Connect the emotions and experiences created in the poem to your life to create meanings. This is not a code. So much of a poem lives in you.
Let's practice.
Shema
by Primo Levi
You who live secure
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Primo Levi: a Jewish-Italian poet and writer, was born in Turin in 1919. Before the Second World War he was an industrial chemist. In 1943 he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where he survived due to his “usefulness” to the Nazis as a chemist. His most famous prose work is “If This is a Man” in which he wrote about his experiences in Auschwitz. Haunted by his Holocaust experiences, he committed suicide in 1987.
Now obviously you probably won't relate to Levi's immediate context of Auschwitz. You are not there. There is surely a message and something he wants you to get. However, I believe that first of all things, there is something he wants you to feel.
There is meaning in the emotions. What words resonate with you? They may be different for each person. For example, the woman with no hair is exceptionally haunting to me. It connects to me of seeing loved ones going through Chemo and how they slowly seem less and less human. Someone alive but barely human. Alive but not living. Is this a man? Is this a woman? By connecting the poem to a personal memory and a personal connection, my emotions guide me to meaning. I didn't have to decode symbols or look at authorial intent. All I had to do was feel and ask "how did he make me feel that?" and "why does he want me to feel that?"
Emotions are the key to the door of poetry. Intellect is merely the hand turning the key.
More practice, and yes, more Holocaust poems because I am currently working on a Unit Plan for Night.
Psalm / Paul Celan
Noone kneads us again from earth and loam,
noone evokes our dust.
Noone.
Praised be you, noone.Because of you we wish
to bloom.
Against
you.
A nothing
were we, are we, will
we be, blossoming:
the nothing's-, the noonesrose.
With
its pistil soulbright,
its stamen heavencrazed,
its crown red
from the purpleword that we sang
over, o over
its thorn.
Paul Celan: Celan was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina in 1920. In 1942 Celan saw his parents deported to Auschwitz. He survived the Shoah in other camps but never recovered from his ordeal and in 1970 committed suicide. Celan’s highly acclaimed work is powerful, highly original, often ambiguous and deeply tragic.
Celan gets more abstract for us and I love it. What do I feel? What do you feel? I feel immediately disoriented by the frequent non-words in the poem. For example, noone is not a worde. It should be no one. Noonesrose is definitely not a word and soulbright, heavencrazed, and purpleword are all not words. They are multiple words combined (although to be fair in the original language they may have been a single word). Why does the author want to disorient and frustrate me? Why does he do it through distortion and incorrect language?
Continue asking these questions.
Until then, have a good week Time Travellers,
Rory
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