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“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars…” — Pádraig Ó Tuama Poetry as an act of listening. Poetry as an act of dancing. Poetry as an act of bowing before sky, ushering the dawn. For Jane Hirshfield, poetry thrums with “fierce aliveness.”[1] It is not a pulseless scaffold. It is not a fretwork of verbs and nouns imprisoned in reasoning, corseted by rational knowledge. “A poem,” Hirshfield sings, “is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart’s walls’ mortar.”[2] A poem throbs with presence. A poem honours the animal. Tucked softly under its syntax, a soul flutters. Poetry sprinkles signs of its livingness in its sister word, its semantic companion: creation. Creation invokes creature. They drink from the same etymology.[3] Together, they stir “prismatic grief and unstunted delight.”[4] That which is creature swaddles wildness close. That which is creature follows the traceries of rivers, oceans, the soft shores of forests. And that which is creative--electric, glistening, a glissando of weaves and threads--greets the world with loud, savage hope, a sensation that we raise “honourably, with small hands and inked words.”[5] Consider, softly, Dominique Hecq’s Otopos: My hand yawns. It is a beak opening. What is to “feel for the shape of a poem?”[7] How do we stir the poetic strings, pluck pirouetting chords from air, the fragments that balloon, wide-eyed, inside our human chests? Must we rake our creative fields until a poem spills open like a robin egg, wet with sudden emergence, a frail pilgrim floundering towards flight? The answer lies beyond form. The answer lies beyond genre. The answer lies beyond the snow of sentences. We must turn our poem-hearts to music. We must lift the gauze of language and grow plush with feeling, fertile with imagining, like Martin Heidegger’s aletheia: “being… stepped out into the unconcealedness of [our] being.”[8] A book and a footpath we followed A poem is not, Jane Hirshfield insists, “a piece of fruit lifted from a tree branch.”[10] It is not a half-green apple whose ripening is ushered by structure, warmed into plump redness by rhyme, order, a fertiliser of the familiar. Instead, it is “honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life.”[11] It is, as philosopher Alsadir Nuar propounds, an annunciation that “I’m here, alive, charting my own narrative.”[12] If we translate poems into plastic, classifiable, frost-brittle shapes, we “risk reducing the dimensionality of what is being imparted to a single mode of understanding and become less likely to get at… ‘the real thing.’”[13] Put simply, we thwart our capacity for poetic jouissance.[14] Instead, we must ensure that form is fluid and honours a poem’s musicality. Form is the flute through which poetry’s music is played. But music, steeped in near-undefinability, is delineated by Hirshfield as a soaring essence; it is freed from the shock of logic.[15] Music is a mosaic of heart-shaped notes, whose carefully patterned wildness--a crescendo here, an inflection there--arc into profound purposefulness and beauty. Rhythm, cadence change, and tonal shift become the spine from which the spirit of music emerges, untamed and uncatchable, plunging into feeling as a disburdened entity. “Music is not a science,” the novelist Ouida declares. “It is a sublime instinct.”[16] So, too, is poetry a divine distillation of inner impulse. It is not an act of intellect: “if art were about intellect", poet Mary Ruefle asserts, “there would be no artists; there would only be intellectuals.”[17] Poetry is about embodying a feeling that spills above the intellect. We must regard poetry’s form as a gathering place. We must regard poetry’s form as a basket, a nest into which poetry’s music can nestle, “unmistakably… dipping its wing.”[18] "I do not think I really have anything to say about poetry other than remarking that it is a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer’s eve—if you persist in following the thrush it will only recede deeper and deeper into the woods; you will never actually see the thrush…" [19] Here, Ruefle defenestrates the calculability of poetry and its transmutation from breath to page. Poetry radiates with an embodied animal spirit, one whose capture, if attempted by the genre-taught, intellectually-glutted searcher, becomes a breed of “dissection, but not of a corpse—of a live body. Murder.”[20] Instead of honouring the majestic mystery of the thrush, the spontaneity of feathered, fluted language, the rational poet confines it to what Nuar calls “a killing jar, then pin and frame behind glass what would not have otherwise have lent itself to becoming a classifiable specimen attached to categorised meaning.”[21] Strict structures can suppress the foundational heartbeat of a poem, detracting from spontaneity, breath, and wildness. One with Nuar, Hirshfield recognises the true peril of snipping poetry’s wings. A poem, she insists, is “a destination whose centre cannot ever be mapped or reached.”[22] It is an alchemised elixir imbued with “a mysterious quickening… protean, elusive, alive in its own right.”[23] A poem need not be painted with the litany of logic, nor need it be applied on a canvas of clarified, crystalline intention. There is great power in non-rational knowledge, in a sudden non-rational sense that a poem must break convention, stray down a different pathway. We must tune our poems to the key of the earth. And we must tune our poems to our own earthness, our own animal—the hope-furred self that throbs with the vast, oceanic wisdom welling just below the skin. Art reminds us of states of animal vigour; it is on the one hand an excess and overflow of blooming physicality into the world of image and desire; on the other, an excitation of the animal function through the images and desires of intensified life;—an enchantment of the feeling of life, a stimulant to it.[24] Poetry is the pinnacle of animal vigour. When we write with our animal, dancing upon the page in an ecstasy of hoofbeats, we are no longer moored in the classifiable. We are free to step beyond the page and enter the spirit of things. “There is no need to interpret, to hanker after meaning,” Nuar insists, “because you can feel.”[25] Where does the real poetry “We have been raised,” Audre Laude illuminates, to fear “the yes within ourselves.”[27] This yes can be lost when it is buried under classifiable shapes, modes, syllabic meters. We have been disillusioned to discard our deepest and most striking compass, the incandescent instinct of gut and vein, “because it threatens any system that calls upon us to prioritise external knowledge over internal knowledge.”[28] Our yes asks us to tune in to our tissues. Our yes asks us to flower into an altar, one adorned with “essence, presence, insight, eroticism, animating impulse, the human and the real.”[29] To write from the “moist dark”—the beat of breath, the sinew of soul—is to honour “the yes within ourselves.”[30] When we honour the yes within our writing, words branch beyond black flecks and boneless lines. There is an incalculable spirit within poetry that connects us to the world’s aliveness, one that is honoured by breaking the form and experimenting with the shape, musicality, and essence a poem can possess. No longer are they regurgitated patterns, hollow formulas, curling limply against the ivory of a page; they mirror “the jewelled vision in the heart.”[31] "Look! I am drinking the stars!"[32] We must write, Nuar exults, “like a dancer jumping.”[33] And then, in a voice of sun: “Poetry needs to wholly kiss, have holy effect.”[34] Form is not the soul of a poem; it is not even the liver. “Poetry is not the poem,” Jorge Luis Borges expounds, “for the poem may be nothing more than a series of symbols.”[35] A poem is a poem when it announces itself in our bodies. Regardless of shape, vessel, sentence length, we know a poem is present when “a hunger, an essence… polishes the spirit to a lush spark / like a match scratched into light.”[36] “It takes great courage to speak in fragments,” Ruefle declares. “It takes great courage to speak in whole sentences.”[37] To write is to courageously feel. To courageously feel is to enter poem magic: since feeling is first And to write with our animal--our soft poem-hearts as they flutter inside the river’s palm—is to remember that world is altar, that life is; that poetry is the warm face of our beloved. Good Footnotes [1] Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015), 9. [2] “A Poem Is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield,” the Paris Review, published March 11 2020, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/11/a-poem-is-not-a-frontal-assault-an-interview-with-jane-hirshfield/. [3] Hirshfield, Ten Windows, 6. [4] Ibid., 5. [5] “A Poem Is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield.” [6] Dominique Hecq, Australian Poetry Anthology Volume 11 (Melbourne: Australian Poetry Ltd, 2024), 18. [7] Ibid. [8] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: State University of New York Press, 1962), 59. [9] Joanna Klink, “Auroras,” Poetry Foundation, published n.m, 2007, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56441/auroras. [10] Hirshfield, Ten Windows, 6. [11] Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 42. [12] Alsadir Nuar, Animal Joy (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022), 97. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid. [15] Hirshfield, Ten Windows, 8. [16] “Music Quotes,” Oboe Insight, published 6 February 2005, https://www.oboeinsight.com/2005/02/06/music-quotes/. [17] Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey, 304. [18] Beth Ann Fennelly, “The Last Hummingbird of Summer,” Poetry Foundation, published March, 2024, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161986/the-last-hummingbird-of-summer. [19] Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey, n.p. [20] Nuar, Animal Joy, 71. [21] Ibid. [22] Hirshfield, Ten Windows, 5. [23] Ibid., 6. [24] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (London: Penguin Classics, 2017), 480. [25] Nuar, Animal Joy, 103. [26] Hafiz, The Gift (London: Penguin Compass, 1999), 259. [27] Nuar, Animal Joy, 69. [28] Ibid. [29] Ibid., 70. [30] Ibid., 69. [31] Hafiz, The Gift, 135. [32] Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey, 101. [33] Nuar, Animal Joy, 99. [34] Ibid., 36. [35] Ibid. [36] Gavin Yuan Gao, At the Altar of Touch (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2022), 23. [37] Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey, 83. [38] Ibid., 35. [39] Hafiz, The Gift, 95. Works Cited Australian Poetry Ltd. Australian Poetry Anthology Volume 11. Melbourne: Australian Poetry Ltd, 2024. Fennelly, Beth Ann. “The Last Hummingbird of Summer.” Poetry Foundation, published March, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161986/the-last-hummingbird-of-summer. Gao, Gavin Yuan. At the Altar of Touch. Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2022. Hafiz. The Gift. London: Penguin Compass, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: State University of New York Press, 1962. Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Hirshfield, Jane. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. New York: Penguin Random House, 2015. Klink, Joanna. “Auroras.” Poetry Foundation. Published n.m., 2007. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56441/auroras. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. London: Penguin Classics, 2017. Nuar, Alsadir. Animal Joy. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022. Oboe Insight. “Music Quotes.” Published 6 February 2005. https://www.oboeinsight.com/2005/02/06/music-quotes/. On Being. “Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson.” Published September 6 2018. https://onbeing.org/programs/padraig-o-tuama-and-marilyn-nelson-so-let-us-pick-up-the-stones-over-which-we-stumble-friends-and-build-altars/. Ruefle, Mary. Madness, Rack and Honey. New York: Wave Books, 2012. The Paris Review. “A Poem Is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield.” Published March 11 2020. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/11/a-poem-is-not-a-frontal-assault-an-interview-with-jane-hirshfield/. Eartha Davis is a woman of Ngāpuhi heritage living on Wurundjeri land. She is a 2025 Varuna Residential Fellow and an intern at Red Room Poetry. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Anthology, Cordite, Rabbit, South Coast Writer’s Centre, Baby Teeth Journal, Wildness, takahē, Minarets, Circular, and Frozen Sea, among others. She dreams of mountains.
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