We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
20th Century French Philosopher*
Writing a poem is living the second half of NOW.
The first half of NOW is the actual experience. NOW I receive these sensations through my eyes, ears, fingers, nose, and mouth. I see, hear, feel, smell, taste a very specific well-defined set of sensations. These sensations produce certain thoughts and feelings. Other sensations, other times, other places would produce other thoughts and feelings. But this particular configuration of sensing, thinking, feeling is the event of right NOW.
Poetry is the extension of NOW.
William Wordsworth (what a great name for a poet) the 19th century English Romantic poet defined poetry:
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
As a Romantic poet Wordsworth emphasized the emotional aspect of poetry over the intellectual. Modern poetry attempts to capture the fully received experience of a particular NOW – sensation – emotion – meaning. Poetry recalls a previous NOW – and re-presents it, makes it present again. Poetry is language at full strength, undiluted. It offers us experience refined in the fire of another person’s body/mind/imagination.
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*Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-1961) was a phenomenologist and along with Jean Paul Sartre a founder of existentialism. He thought the philosophy of the past put a wedge between the mind and the body, devaluing experience and elevating thought. He taught that we do not experience the world directly through the mind. We first experience the world through the body, the senses, then interpret them with our intellect. Merleau-Ponty reclaims the body’s importance in making fundamental contact with the phenomenon of the life-world. For this reason his work has played a role in understanding modern poetry.