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text conversations with my ex-partner

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(the cow does not like the cartesian split)

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NB: i'm assuming that the mind and body are separate things (i.e. the cartesian split), which you might disagree with! i think it's an interesting assumption for the sake of a good metaphor to understand poetry through, but whether the split is actually a true reflection of reality? that's a different can of worms entirely!

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reflecting back on this, i think this metaphor gave me a way of seeing and understanding my flurry anxieties: my youth was the lemon, something that follows rules of physics, changes in predictable and inevitable ways. this metaphor helped me understand my emotions through connecting them to the world. it united the mental and the physica

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(open this link and run the game to continue!)

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(open this link and run the game to continue!)

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learn from the flowers about time, change, and moving on

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do you want to have a go too?

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maybe my obsession with the lemon was excessive. but i do generally want to be attentive, look with care, dig beyond the surface of the concrete things for their minds, their meanings

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this one was painted by my dear friend Rose

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the lemon, as immortalised in a spotify playlist i made at the time. i cannot find the original photo anymore.

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(incidentally, the love heart of leaves became a metaphor as well, giving me solace through its own network of entailments: to be loved is to be changed, to move on is a process of self-love, etc.)

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i was weirdly at peace with at all

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and when the lemon did eventually, inevitably fall

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let me tell you, this was a metaphor that i obsessed over. it helped me a lot. i wrote songs about it. i made art about it

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...and this is also beautiful and inevitable

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new phases of my life will grow...

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the loss of youth is useful (i.e. dropped lemons can make lemonade, lost youth can make...adults?)

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the loss of youth is inevitable

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the loss of youth is natural

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one day, my youth will fall onto the ground and rot into oblivion

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my youth is ephemeral

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my youth is fruitful

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"the lemon is my youth". and from this sprung a web of entailments:

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i looked to the lemon - concrete, external, objective - to make sense of my emotions regarding ageing - abstract, internal, subjective

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at the same time, i was growing up. i was worried about this, about my loss of youth, my loss of silliness, my loss of what made me myself

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a few years ago, there was a lemon that hung on the tree in my backyard all winter long. every lemon fell off apart from this one.

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maybe an example would be apt

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then metaphor, in bridging concrete and abstract, could connect the body and the mind?

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and the mind is abstract

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so, if we say that the body is concrete

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the gist: when you compare something abstract with something concrete, you develop a new way of seeing the abstract thing

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this isn't my idea, by the way. George Lackoff and Mark Johnson explore this notion in their book 'Metaphors We Live By'

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(((highlighted quote from Eleni Stecopoulos' book 'Visceral Poetics', embedded in Andy Jackson's piece 'Caesura and the Deforming Poem: Rupture as a Space for the Other')))

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some haikus by Grant Caldwell which i like to think exhibit this "haiku moment"

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disclaimer: Collingwood's art as a mental process idea has been debated extensively by philosophers. most think he's wrong. whatever. i like his theory

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if poems are art, art is expression, and expression is a mental process, we might suggest that poetry is a mental process?

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interestingly, this aligns with the most unique (and controversial!) part of Collingwood's theory of art, that art is inherently...

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the most interesting thing about Collingwood's theory, though, is that he says art is this expression! the painting, the play, the poem - these are mere art objects. the actual ART is inherently...

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but a mind? a mind has no such restriction. it is the mind, i think, that creates and revels in the haiku moment. the mind is where the haiku takes place.

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a haiku moment transcends the physical to some degree. a body is only ever a body and is only ever discrete. it lacks the union of a haiku moment, lacks the capacity for opposites to meet

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maybe that halcyon haiku moment in which every paradox seems self-evidently true, in which the subject and object coalesce in an intimate and flawed union, is a perfect example of poetry as a facet of the mind

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(my notes form a poetry class i did a while back)

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(my notes form a poetry class i did a while back)

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side note: i recently learnt that haikus don't even need to follow the 5-7-5 syllable structure! as long as they're minimalist and strive for a "haiku moment"

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cool white light

sometimes i think of

the morning sun

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three songs at once

gym speakers and headphones

and silence

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row of dumbbells

with metallic gleam

oh, envy

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i have come to know

my emotions through writing

haikus in the past.

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one of the most interesting explanations i know is that given by philosopher R. G. Collingwood. he claims that expression is coming to know the particularities of an emotion and thereby becoming liberated from the oppressive burden of an emotion you feel but do not understand

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but what, exactly, is this expression?

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lightning carving a beautiful sequence of letters onto the trees, or the repeated waves crashing morse code holes into the rock

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despite this...

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whether crafted by human hands or natural chance, poems, as a body that is physical, as written words and cracks and splendid chance, tell a story about the physical world that created it

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sometimes, i like to imagine a poem written by uncontrolled natural chance as well as uncontrolled human chance

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poet Andy Jackson has written about how disabled bodies, or "free verse bodies", can be represented by poetry. free verse, he suggests, allows poets to resist hegemonic poetic form and structure, much like the disabled body resists the hegemony of able-bodiedness.

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Free-Verse Bodies. Or, Is Poetry Deformed?

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One of the reasons I began writing poems was my visible difference. I have severe spinal curvature, due to a genetic condition called Marfan Syndrome. This skeletal divergence from expected form be…

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poets have gone running with this idea, interpreting caesura, enjambment, rhythm, and form as metaphors for our bodies as able or disabled, injured or healthy, whole or fractured

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this seems to be the more traditional school of thought regarding poetry

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an impulse and an expression that transcends the mereness of the physical

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a product of instinct and pattern, both conscious and subconscious

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metaphors are a way of understanding the internal through reference to the external. they let us comprehend something messy and hard to understand (like minds, emotions, mental states) through reference to things we do understand (the physical world, the body)

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my reasoning is this:

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and the bridge that connects the body and the mind in the poem is...

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i've recently been considering that maybe both views could be right

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poetry can be meandering, messy, sporadic

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our minds?!

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i sometimes think that poetry can be more like

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a poem can be broken

like a body. a poem

can be examined

like a body.

a poem can be read like a body. (or maybe it's better to say a body can be read like a poem)

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sometimes i think about poetry as a body

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sometimes i think about poetry as a body