Preface to Pulse
by Rufus the Verbose
Mind Reading: Words as Paint
Poetry is perhaps one of the closest forms of visual art that can be achieved by pure language. Prose has its power in conveying a sense of sequence, time, and order. Given suitable descriptiveness, prose in itself can achieve the literary levels of the fine visual arts by incurring the strong imaginative power of the reader. Where prose stops, however, and where poetry takes over is getting deep down inside the writer's thoughts, where thoughts transcend words, and words themselves become the paint with which the writer speaks what's in the mind, on the heart, within the spirit.
Stream of Consciousness poetry has come closest, in my opinion, to the purest form of thought-conveyance. Reading the words, with patience and imagination, has the effect of reading the writer's thoughts, and hearing in its purest form what is intended to say.
Poetry has the power to move people, not into an active sense, but in the sense that poetry moves emotions, when written to do so, it engages the pathos within and can manipulate emotion. Affection, anger, apathy, disdain, empathy, laughter, longing, love, malaise, mirth, pathos, sadness, tragedy: all these, the whole pallet, are what poetry speciallizes in. These things are its power.
"The point of the journey is not to arrive" -Neil Peart
In the early years of this decade I started keeping journals as an attempt to understand the world around me and, namely, myself--the world within. In this process, I discovered a poetic drive within me, one that was young, expressive, seeking escape onto the written page. My early tries were genuine tries in their own right. In retrospect, I've seen that the beast within has grown up to speak clearer, the processes inside have been combed into finer channels of expression. With this passing of time and the practice of writing, writing, and writing, I have become better. The pages of scrawl and jumble and forced meter have brought me into the next stage, where writing is not just personal therapy, but a pleasure, beyond a pass-time. My hobby, my first love.
Common function, like dance, values all
Poetry has the ability to be universal. It's a people's art, a poor-man's voice of expression. I have attempted to write prose, and to my dismay, I failed mostly at doing so. Writing novels, novella, stories, those things plot-based, contrasting those things image-based, are things only a few can successfully tame. The more I talk with people, the more poets I find. Next to pen-and-pencil artwork, poetry is one of the most popular, common art forms. It would seem that with the deluge of poetry "out there" in the world, the value of each individual poem would be utterly worthless. I don't believe this is so -- a poem's value lies not just in its uniqueness, or its ability to please an editor, or its connectivity between the writer and the reader, but the value of a poem is strong when the writer feels he has said all he wanted to say, and is sure of the representation of the intangibles with the words. And finally, when someone falls in love with it.
Painting open doors...
My friend Jeff Smithpeters once commented to me that to know Language was to know Empowerment. Knowing the vocabulary of the strong and is a major step in being strong yourself. I will affirm in this; knowing the pantheon of colors in the palette strengthens the senses of discernment, empowers the literary painter to better express, and not only that, but to manipulate, to tell the emotional story. Blues, mauve, rouge: COLOR. Laid-down in patterns that come by practice, the final setting of ink
Final Art: gallery of works
These poems are a subset of the immense dirth of poetry on the field, like a drop from an ocean. A collection, hand-picked to be placed here on public display. Mind open, doors allowing into the souls of those who assembled the words, take these in. Good, happy, solemn and telling stories, they are here for you. Enjoy the gifts.
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