Like a young lad I

used my cache of poisonous names to conger a ghost. And whom did I receive none other then Paul Valery, the turn of the century polymath of French poetry, prose and drama scene. The francs he had in his pocket were made of gold, so he hocked them for food money after I washed off the ectoplasm. Ghost stuff. You know. Anyway, over burritos we got to talkin about poetry and I told him about our last class discussion when he just started going off about this lecture he did back in the day over in Oxford in 1939. ‘Bout poetry and abstract thought. So I’m like, Dude, Paul, you gotta write some of this down for me and he’s like, Oui, Je sais! So he gets introduced to the Sharpie and I start grabbing clutches of burrito napkins cause ol’ Pauly here can’t stop writing. Thus, here’s some borrowed thoughts about poets, poetry and the act of writing it.

Paul wrote, and I napkin quote:

“I maintain that we must be careful of a problem’s first contact with our minds. We should be careful of the first words a question utters in our mind… Without realizing it we desert our original problem, and in the end we shall come to believe that we have chosen an opinion wholly our own, forgetting that our choice was exercised only on a mass of opinions that are the more or less blind work of other men and of chance.”

So I’m like, Dude, Paul, so what you are saying is that as a writer of poetry I must be cautious of catching onto these random phrases and blips of inspiration, in order not to allow my true need to write to be mislead? Is poetry more that just the act of catching strings of words through the wind in our mind with our butterfly nets? Then there's no room for the act of drowning them in ether, and placing them upon cardboard, wings spread with a pin, to use the entomological metaphor for what’s called editing.

Paul’s responded with:

“Each and every word that enables us to leap so rapidly across the chasm of thought, and to follow the prompting of an idea that constructs its own expression, appears to me like one of those planks which one throws across a ditch or a mountain crevasse and which will bear a man crossing it rapidly. But he must pass without weighing on it, without stopping – above all, he must not take it into head to dance on the slender plank to test its resistance!”

Wow, you could have just said yes. But haven’t you had those moments where those random thoughts turned into something?

Paul continued to scribble:

“I have, then, noticed myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some of them were finally realized in poems. They came about from no apparent cause, arising from some accident or other; they developed according to their own nature, and consequently I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind. Then, the cycle completed, I returned to the rule of ordinary exchanges between my life and my thought. But meanwhile a poem had been made, and in completing itself the cycle left something behind. This closed cycle is the cycle of an act which has, as it were, aroused and given external form to a poetic power…”

But Pauly, what about the poet’s role? And that of poetry itself?

Napkin:

“This is to say that the state of poetry is completely irregular, in constant, involuntary, and fragile, and that we lose it, as we find it, by accident. But this state is not enough to make a poet, any more than it is enough to see a treasure in a dream to find it, on walking, sparkling and the foot of one’s own bed. A poet’s function – do not be startled by this remark –”

Aah! Sorry, I forgot you were a ghost.

He continued:

“is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others. The poet is recognized – or at least everyone recognizes his own poet – by the simple fact that he causes his reader to become “inspired.” Positively speaking, inspiration is a graceful attribute with which the reader endows his poet: the reader sees in us the transcendent merits of virtues and graces that develop in him. He seeks and finds in us the wondrous cause of his own wonder.”

Well, that clears everything right up. Thanks Monsieur Valery. Want to hit the bars for a cognac?

“Oui.”