But is poetry mere description?
Does not the poet -- like some insurgent of the
intuition -- also re-form the world?
Etymologically, poetry refers to creativity and
not simple romanticism; a poet is a "maker." \1
Likewise, the archaic
definition of "maker" is "poet."
Didn't Whitman write, "I am the poet of reality?"
Poetry is (e)motion
recollected in contemplation.
And the heart
of truth is empirical experience.
Thus, poetry is a creative action, engaging and
re-shaping truth or totality, the heart of things.
Always shifting, always adjusting, always morphing.
Ah, if we could only photograph
it and hold it still!
Science? Scientific knowledge?
I have learned more by blundering
my way around the world ... than I have learned by conducting academically
planned, "statistically sound" scientific studies, which usually are more
often the painful elaboration of self-evident
patterns than the gateway to wisdom. To feel is to know.
Somewhere in the Far East of Russia, in
very southern Siberia, is the land of the Elduga
River ... and its riverine cousins, its old conifer valley forests,
and its vanishing wildlife. The land of endangered Siberian tigers
and the nearly extinct Amur leopard and Blakiston's fish owl.
Over many ventures there, and elsewhere in Far East Russia
and China, brought me to understand the hunters, trappers, and wildlife
as cousins of my own.
I lived briefly with the Udege Tribe of the Bikin,
tracked radio-collared leopards with the best of the "tiger men," camped
in dense forests closed to all but the hardiest of scientists -- men and
women dedicated to the plants and animals that
birthed us all.
Elduga -- conjures it all
for me ...
... for Nature is within
us,
it is the nature of us to
see
ourselves in tree ... and rock ... and soil.
We are the canyons, the ancient cliff-dwellers,
the sky-watchers.
It is the nature within us that not just knows, but intimately feels the harshness of the storm, just as it feels the pain that relation can bring.
There is no other truth than what we feel, no other truer canon than our own heart.
And for this, we should raise a cup in gratitude to the Udege, to the leopard, to the botanist ... brothers and sisters of the heart, all.
------------------------
\1 The word poet is derived from the Middle English poete,
taken from the Latin poeta, taken from the Greek po(i)etes,
meaning maker.
Above two photos © Bruce G. Marcot.
