Knowledge in Poetry

Tacitly, the criticism of critics against poems often points a cynical finger at the knowledge the poet carries into a poem. How the knowledge inside a poem becomes the knowledge of a poem. While the former is really about what is present and absent in a poem, what is named or unnamed, the latter— that is, the knowledge of a poem— is conditional on the promise in a poem. So, what is promise in a poem, if not the weight of absence supporting presence?

What is absence in a poem? What constitutes it? How is it constituted? These are questions only knowledge can answer, really answer. The extent of what is known, and how?

Say, we want to write a poem about a daffodil. We indeed write that poem, ten stanzas of quatrains. There is the higher probability that we have merely recycled knowledge, and not experienced it. In a sense, we have neither individualised nor localised knowledge. However, give that same poem, in 354 BC, to a reader and you may become their Soyinka.

This scenario would, of course, raise the question of the poeticity of a poem. Relative to context or not? Terry Eagleton makes a good argument on this when he concludes that “There is no ‘essence’ of literature whatsoever.” So that, a poem is not only any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly, but a functional rather than an ontological term.

All the above is a paraphrase of Eagleton. While it absolves the daffodil-writing poet from literary purists, it also demands from the poet the responsibility of putting inside a poem the argument for the poem’s craft. In other words, a poem behind which, very underneath it, there is the promise of something palpable. By which we may say the poem has knowledge— that is, it has something to say; it knows more than it actually tells; its absence is so weighted that it gives leniency to its presence.

All this is fancy talk.

If we say the goodness of a poem is relative, by which we mean the value judgements are inconstant, conditional on power relations current in the appropriate places, it should follow that: i) the knowledge one carries into a poem must agree with the present value judgements or must impose its own values, or ii) the poem would risk cynicism from the reader— has it any knowledge at all? any worth? any promise? any thing inside it ticking?

This need for promise in a poem, needless to say, is cultural and historical. At some point, obscurantism was thought a symbol of this promise. And there have been many literary traditions— which does not exclude Oral poets/ spokenword poets— which have tried to argue for the promise, the solidity, in its own craft. But even this search for solidity, for sense in a poem, which I have said is historical and cultural comes from certain cultures and certain histories- from which we may deviate, insofar those parameters and values are unsustainable in-context.

Then we may come back again to the dilemma: what language is most suitable to carry our knowledge? how do we distrust continually the language we use— expect it to snap from the burden of intimate experience? how do we experience intimately? For a bad poem is bad, to me, when its language is dishonest, on the assumption that there is experience.