poet as shaman

A friend has started working on an essay for her school about the thread of divinity in poetry, the ways it has been approached and how its expression still has very simlair elements over the centuries, whether you're talking the ecstatic love of Rumi's enitre cannon or the beat worship of Ginsburg's postscript to "Howl." She asked me for some examples of poets who expres divinity, and besides those two, and the classic examples of Blake, Yeats, and the other romantic poets, I suggested my personal favorite, Rainer Maria Rilke, who was influenced heavily by Rumi's style of personally addressing the divine as a Beloved.

During her research my friend stumbled upon this fascinating article analyzing Rilke's poetry in the context of how the poem and poet metamorphosize in relation to each other and the experience of the world.

"Each poem can be seen as a birth canal, a metaphysical tunnel, an entrance into reality which effects a distinct change in the man who travels through it. Although it is, in some sense, the poet who writes the poem, there is another sense in Hass of the poem changing the poet-writing him, as it were. "

This idea of poetry makes it very simliair to the shamanic rebirth experience, but one in which the poet is constantly being reborn in new perceptions of the world. As my friend, the redneck poet Johnny "Squibb" Menesini, put it, "everytime I write a pome I think I'm dying."

The article goes on to paint Rilke as a man who would go running out into the street clutching a white iris to his chest in order to escape the torment of the images in his head, which brings up one of my favorite past times and role of both poets and shamans, solitary walks, when alone with the world (whether country or city) the divinity and clarity imminenet in all things starts to break out and become real. When the mundane transcends itself, and crystalizes in an image that can be passed on which, as Blake put it, shows the whole world in a grain of sand. Very much like the chaos magician's use of a simple sigil image to encode much deeper levels of information within the psyche.

and as I told my friend, this is something that fascinated me greatly too, and it looks like we may have a bit of friendly competition trying to tie all this together. look for an essay about magic poetry on key23 soon.