Like the moon needs poetry…

January 26th is the Dutch Poetry day! On that day, Academic Forum, in collaboration with Univers and Extra Muros, organizes the annual Tilburg University Poetry Party. Two years ago, I experienced the joy of being elected Tilburg Campus Poet 2015. Last year, I had the honour to sit on the jury and to vote for the Tilburg Campus poet 2016, Jan Völkel. And what about this year? Surely, I’ll be in the audience of the next University Poetry Party, voting for the Tilburg Campus Poet 2017… in the meantime, I will celebrate the power of poetry in this blog!

This post is about a bizarre figure of speech, and the weight of poetry.

‘LIKE THE MOON NEEDS POETRY…’

69 Love Songs, by the Magnetic Fields, is an album that turned my prejudices about love songs upside down. As the title suggests, 69 Love Songs is a collection of 69 tracks dealing with the same topic: singing about love.

Not to mention the fact that putting so many songs together, and yet succeeding in securing that each song sounds very different from the other, is already an epic undertaking … what amazed me most about the album is that, track after track, singing about love never appears a trite exercise.

Part of the credit for the prodigious variety of the album surely goes to the imaginative way in which language is used. When you listen to those lyrics, their plain language gives you the impression that you are easily getting what the song is about.

But, on the other hand, hidden between the lines, there are also words that sound like inner jokes between lovers, so you cannot entirely get rid of the unsettling feeling that you are missing something important about the song.
So, the language does the trick of saying and concealing; and this combination is kind of like admitting that, when it comes to be in love, what we all have in common is … everything and nothing, at the same time.

Among the song lyrics of 69 Love Songs, there are a couple of memorable lines – at least, for me! One line in particular comes to my mind (unfinished) every time I attend a poetry event.

‘… Like the wind needs the trees
to blow in,
Like the moon needs poetry …’

I love this ungrounded simile! It is the inconsistency of this figure of speech that makes it so powerful! I think, indeed, that we can all agree about the fact that wind blowing does not need any tree! And moon phases really do not need the help of any poet to occur.

But, in this case, reality is beside the point! What counts is actually the humans’ point of view. Wind is certainly more pleasant when it blows through trees, but we can say so only when there are human ears attending to its sound. And it’s the human point of view about the world that leads to poetry; Moon doesn’t care!

‘Moon doesn’t care’ is also the leitmotif of one of the best-known poems of Italian literature. In the poem ‘Night Song Of A Wandering Shepherd In Asia’ by Leopardi, the silent eternal moon stands in opposition to the poetic voice of a desolate shepherd. The poem is a monologue addressed to the Moon; and it is about the burdens of the condition of being mortals. But who is there to listen to the shepherd’s voice? Nobody!

Yet thou, eternal, lonely wanderer,
Who, thoughtful, lookest on this earthly scene,
Must surely understand
What all our sighs and sufferings mean;
What means this death,
This color from our cheeks that fades,
This passing from the earth, and losing sight
Of every dear, familiar scene.

The moon doesn’t reply. But this fact does not matter! What matters is just the reference that Leopardi makes to this timeless and indifferent listener. With its distance from the earth, with its silent detachment from human affairs, the moon confers a special power to the poet’s voice: it ‘simply takes the weight out of language, to the point that it resembles moonlight’.

These words are used to celebrate Leopardi’s poetry by another of the best-known Italian writers, Italo Calvino, in his ‘Six Memos For The Next Millennium‘. This book collects six lectures by Calvino about what should be cherished most in literature. The first one is dedicated to ‘Lightness’ and it’s a very precious reading for everyone who considers literature in general, and poetry in particular, a way of dealing with reality.

(…) Literature as an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living. (…)

Moon doesn’t need poetry. But we do!

Last year, this idea of human search for lightness through poetry resonated in my mind when I was reading Jan Völkel’s comment on his election as campus poet 2016.

He said that for him writing poetry is a special way of expressing his commitment to society, and to share this with other people.

(… ) Poetry can be funny and relevant to society as well as beautiful. (…)

I like to think that sometimes we just need to stop asking ‘What’s that for?’, and to start accepting ‘Oh … that is simply beautiful!’ as an answer.