The Poetic

From Bryan White

For a long time, I was divided between two possible directions that I wanted go with my writing. On the one hand, I felt like I wanted to write something “intellectual” for lack of a better word, something that was like a complicated machine with all kinds of ideas and moving parts, something dense and layered in its interpretation. On the other hand, I wanted to write something sentimental, something simpler, something that didn’t tackle any “big questions” but rather stayed grounded in feelings evoked by life and home and family and drew on a deep reservoir of memories. These two directions seemed perennially at odds with each other, and neither seemed like an entirely fulfilling direction to go in. The intellectual direction seemed too sterile, and while I definitely found myself leaning more towards the sentimental, I couldn’t really see how to how make that interesting or what of any substance I could find to say, having divorced it in my mind from the intellectual. And so, I was stuck.

Meanwhile, like everyone else, I continued to dream. My dreams went on staging their one act dramas on the dimly lit miniature stage of my sleep undeterred by this division. So I noticed this, and I started turning to dreams for ideas, and possibly as a way out of my dilemma. Due to their inventiveness and their fascinating enigmas, dreams seemed more like they would provide material for this “intellectual” type of writing, but there were glimpses here and there of the sentimental that gave me hope that I would find my way to some of that territory as well. And looking back on some of my earlier dream-inspired stories, I sometimes see a haphazard stumbling back and forth between one mode and the other, like the ingredients of a meal that haven’t been quite been mixed together properly.

But as I continue to write my short dream pieces, and I slowly find my footing, I’m surprised to find that footing more and more in a place that reconciles that division. It feels less and less like there even is such a division. I feel more at peace with it than at odds. And this place of reconciliation I think of as “the poetic”, again for lack of a better term. And I’m not entirely sure what I mean by this. It’s more a feeling that comes in the writing, a feeling of something carefully laid, a gracefulness of movement, fine threads stitched with a steady hand. It’s something simpler than the intellectual. You don’t have to furrow your brow to keep pace with it; it comes smoother, more sweetly, of its own accord. And yet, it’s heavier in its ideas than the sentimental. There’s more substance, more meaning beyond the personal.

This isn’t to say that the poetic is a middle ground between the intellectual and the sentimental. It’s more of a third axis of its own, with characteristics as unique to it as those of the other two. I see it now, not only in my own writing, but in all kinds of other books and songs and art. It was there all along, and more and more it appears to be the place where I’ll find my way through.