my artistic DNA

This essay, The Dark Art of Poetry by Don Paterson, haunts me. I return to it again and again. It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's a section I particularly admire:

"The human dream is one of all things first recognised, and then named, in accordance with their human utility, translated and metaphorised into the human realm. This dream is almost wholly pervasive, so much so we do not call it a dream at all; we even fall asleep and keep on dreaming inside it. The fact that we corroborate and reenforce the dream-rules in all our human intercourse gives it, of course, the appearance of reality. It is just as flimsy a consensual reality as money. It is a dream....

Whether you take this seriously or not - all this, for the poet, is much more than a little perceptual game. When we allow silence to reclaim those objects and things of the world, when we allow the words to fall away from them - they reassume their own genius, and repossess something of their mystery, their infinite possibility. Then the we awaken a little to the realm of the symmetries again, and of no-time, eternity.

The poet's specific talent: when the things of the world (in which we should very much include our own feelings, ideas, and relations with one other) that we have contemplated in this wordless and thoughtless silence reenter the world of asymmetrical concept, of discrete definition, of speech and language - they return as strangers; and then they declare wholly unexpected allegiances, reveal wholly unsuspected valencies. We see the nerve in the bare tree, we hear the applause in the rain. These things are, in other words, redreamt, they are reimagined, they are remade. This I think is the deepest meaning of our etymology as maker.

One more point: the poem having been translated from the silence, as my friend Charles Simic puts it, it has briefly kept the company of everything, of all natural things, and its desire to then declare a kinship with those things - to become a beautiful manmade natural object, with the integrity, symmetry and rhythm of the natural - should be no surprise."

So the theme for this week's blog posting, if you choose to participate, is to share some of your own artistic DNA. Is there an essay or a poem or a painting or a building or a theory or a fictional character that haunts you, or that informs your own poetics or artistic practice?

(Photo: liquid crystalline DNA)