their secrets by Ben Shaw

hello again!

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:17:50 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:20:20 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:20:27 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:22:41 UTC

look, i know i've been ranting tangentially about haikus and metaphors and mind and body. but who am i (random undergrad student) to say this. what do the experts - the poets - think?

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:23:27 UTC

this is a conversation i might have had with Frank O’hara had he not been fatally hit by a Jeep on Fire Island on July 24^th 1966:

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:23:47 UTC

me: frank, you said in your poetics manifesto on personalism that it doesn’t matter if poetry improves people. “improves them for what? for death?”, you write. what, then, is the value of poetry?

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:24:03 UTC

frank: at times when i would rather be dead the thought that i could never write another poem has so far stopped me.

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:24:16 UTC

me: what is it about poetry that has stopped you thus far?

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:24:31 UTC

frank: it may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:24:42 UTC

_{*The first two responses are direct quotes from O’Hara’s statement of poetics Donald Allen’s anthology ‘The New American Poetry 1945-1960’. The last response is a cento from his ‘Personism: A Manifesto’.}

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:26:10 UTC

me: okay!

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:28:04 UTC

we're not just a body, and we're not just a mind. we have our foot in both doors, but never much more than a foot. and maybe poetry reminds us of that, being a nexus of both mind and body, just like us

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:32:24 UTC

i recently read Sean Hewitt's debut poetry collection 'Tongues of Fire'. it had a lot of beautiful nature poems which made me feel strangely peaceful

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:32:56 UTC

in one interview (linked above!), Hewitt said something which actually inspired this entire project:

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:33:51 UTC

"any poem is a metaphor, since it tries to create a space between what is inside a person and what is on the page"

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:36:29 UTC

poetry is often metaphorically labelled as a bridge or a window. but i think Hewitt's metaphor of poetry as a metaphor is even cooler: poetry, like metaphor, connects two fundamentally different worlds

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:38:33 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:40:18 UTC

whenever the topic of metaphors comes up, i always think of this poem by Ocean Vuong

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:41:08 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:44:19 UTC

i think this sonnet is trying to ask: what does it mean when our culture, through conventional metaphors, defines masculinity and success with the langauge of violence?

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:46:09 UTC

the metaphors in this poem connect the body of violence to the mind of masculinity. the resultant, unified entity is a violent and dangerous one. metaphors are not trivial.

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:58:08 UTC

Vuong has also written more explicitly about the importance of metaphor

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 07:59:27 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 08:03:39 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 08:06:39 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 13:53:48 UTC

me: oh ok. so poetry sort of refocusses the world into more appropriate, more beautiful, more unified terms. and then the poet is blessedly caught in the middle of what’s intangible and concrete?

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 13:55:27 UTC

frank: undoubtedly. the poem places the person squarely between the intangible and the all too concrete

shabs1 — 2025-09-25 14:02:24 UTC

if i asked him for advice for a young poet, i like to imagine Vuong would say this:

shabs1 — 2025-09-26 00:40:43 UTC

but what i really think he's trying to say here (and maybe also what i'm trying to find, as well) is

shabs1 — 2025-10-06 10:15:35 UTC

in these poems, nature is often a metaphor for sexuality or emotions. i felt the poems put me in connection with both nature and these messily human themes.

shabs1 — 2025-10-31 03:09:12 UTC

shabs1 — 2025-11-02 05:24:01 UTC

perhaps the cartesian split is less valid than i previously supposed!