Toward a provisional concept of the quintessence of poetry or “What’s a poem”.

A common or typical poem can be understood as something that can be put in your face or in your ears. With regard to a poem’s relationship to one’s face, the poem may be shoved up one’s nose or rammed down one’s throat. This may, however, occur quite independently of the poem itself. For example, we might imagine that a poem could be inserted into the tip of one’s penis or prescribed as a laxative. It is true that these examples tell us a great deal about my own psychological demeanor, yet they also alert us to the physical nature of the poem. A poem can get into places that a novel or a brush turkey simply can’t get at.

A poem can get in one’s face much like a mature Eastern Grey Kangaroo, insofar as it can kick you in the teeth and tear the sunshine from out of your arsehole and into your chest cavity. This only serves to highlight the fact that the strength of a poem is not relative to its size. Regardless of strength, the relationship of poem to face, as distinct from poem to ear, is most often one of surface to eye. I will call this form a surface poetry.

Any description of the surface that a poem appears on should remain distinct from the poem itself. The computer monitor, the yellowed leaf of paper, the suburban brick wall and the pale blue sky are mediums and would all seem to be irrelevant to the essence of the poem itself; but is this really the case? The non-sighted among us will surely interject, and I think rightly so, that my surface poetry does not give due respect to the capacity of a poem to touch upon the flesh. A poem that is inscribed in Braille must have its surface included within its essence. Therefore, a surface poetry will in some way retain the essence of the surface.

This realisation necessarily raises a question regarding the scent of the surface. Does the ancient smell of the paper or the oil of a leather binding belong to the essence of a poem? If the essence of the poem must give respect to the flesh, there is little reason to deny one’s sense of smell from the experience of a poem. We can therefore include within the essence of a surface poetry each of the following relationships. Surface to eye: surface to flesh: surface to nose.

The relationship between poem and ear can also belong to the essence of a surface poetry; as one of fingernails to blackboard or hammer to nail; but it will be complicated further when we start thinking about the spaces that the sound travels through, and maybe even the emotions or histories that stand within those spaces. One thing seems clear. You don’t have to open your eyes to appreciate surface poetry.

Has morse code ever been used to convey poetry? Does the medium of space belong to the essence of a poem in the same way as that of the surface medium? Why can I imagine writing a poem with scented oils and food colourings into a current at the bottom of Sydney Harbour whilst humming Frank Zappa’s ‘You are what you is’ at a passing Black Bream; but I still feel no closer to putting my finger upon the quintessence of poetry?