a Poem is a Refraction

When I was little, my mother once brought home an optical prism: transparent and heavy, with multiple polished surfaces. Every time I picked up the prism and put it in a sunny place on the windowsill, I saw bright sunbeams appear on the walls—sometimes the colors of the rainbow, sometimes rays of pure, indescribable light. In colloquial Russian, we call them ‘sun bunnies’— a simple and funny expression, although until I started to study physics at school, I kept wondering how a beam of light, accidentally caught by a prism, could be so transformed and retain its magic. I can tell now, after several years of writing poems, they work the same way: a refraction of a ray of light—the world, or reality—that meets the poet—the prism. Humans have always observed the world that surrounds them, trying to capture as many details as possible in order to survive and persevere. And like rays of light that make their way through the curtains in the morning, the world from our very birth envelops us back; even in complete isolation, we cannot stop being influenced by our perception of it. 

Since humans have a degree of physical density to them, we also absorb said world. Details of names and dates from the news get stuck in the back alleys of our minds, memories of awkward encounters pop up just when we want to fall asleep quickly; numbers, recipes, book quotes are all shuffled and arranged in the inner pantry of our brains. All of these absorbed perceptions have their outlets, too. Whether it is one’s dream of becoming a chef or their lack of desire to laugh at an offensive joke, all these impulses are shaped by the reality of this very world, this light pouring from the windows. The poet's main role and skill, then, is to be able to let this light pass through and transform it as a prism does. The poet goes out into the world and, inspired by it, processes their impressions in such a way as to preserve the essence of what they understand, but channeling it through a poem, using language as a tool of modification. The poet opens up to the beam of the world’s light, allowing themself to be pierced by it, and ending up with new waves of poetry. The poem is thus a refraction: a change in the direction of a ray from the external world when passing through the poet’s inner self, manifested in ‘sun bunnies,’ like the single rainbow wave on the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The poem is a transformation. 

In order for the transformation to take place, several crucial participants are needed – agents of action, if you will. An interaction takes place between them. The interaction is achieved between the poet and the world-reality, not only its tangible part, but also the imagination contextualized and framed by it; the poem unites and summarizes this interaction by being its embodiment. A.R. Ammons beautifully articulated this capacity of poetry in his essay “A Poem is a Walk,” in which he accepts the indefinability of poetry and tries to elaborate more on the matter through the analogy of a poem as a walk. He writes, “But poetry, the imagination, can create a vehicle, at once concrete and universal, one and many, similar and diverse, that is capable of bridging the duality and of bringing us the experience of a ‘real’ world that is also a reconciled, a unified, real world.” That is, Ammons recognizes the contradictions between the poet and the world from which the former draws creative ideas. He points at the dichotomy between the world in which we exist and our personal selves, and argues that the interaction of these opposites lends itself to poetry and even reconciles them. 

Such an interaction cannot be logically limited or clearly defined; it rests on uncertainty and inexhaustibility. The abstract and intimate ‘self’ meets the concrete and overwhelming “reality”, and by virtue of this contact, they create poetry – beams of light, familiar and touching precisely because they intersperse originality with relatability. The poet-prism plays a dual role: they first look onto the vast world-light and then plunge into themself, finding an answer to the events outside through internal rethinking. In doing so, they come back to the realization that was already within them. As Ammons puts it, “Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source.” In other words, the essence of light remains the same; it is viewed from a different angle as it passes through the poet like another medium, only to return and fall onto the page in a renewed flow of words. 

This vision of interaction between the poet and reality is almost comforting; it assumes that each person has a source of light and may reunite with it, as with a distant ancestor. It also implies that light is an inexhaustible resource; as long as humanity exists, it always does so within a setting, which means that we all have the ability to create this setting’s refractions in poetry. These refractions are both unique and have common origins, as we navigate the movement of the same light by letting it fill us in our own ways. In addition, the inexhaustible quality of the light makes the relationship between the agents of refraction meaningless. It is not clear why we need to pick up a prism, let alone become one, and let the light pass through us; there are no correct answers. That is another beauty of this engagement. Poetry’s uselessness liberates us, and makes it possible for everyone to determine for themself why they need it; the less we think about meanings and the more we trust and accept our craving for refractions, the more fruitful our interactions with light will be. 

An incredible example of the interplay between the poet and the world, as between light and prism, is Ezra Pound's 1913 poem “In a Station of the Metro:”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

This short poem, inspired by Japanese haiku, turns the author into a prism. Pound takes the image of the faces in the crowd he saw on a subway station, as the title suggests, and parallels it with the petals on a branch of his own imagination. He takes a literal scene from the real world and, passing over through himself the feelings that this scene evokes in him, adds an intuitive analogy to it. “These faces” acquire a ghostly aura through the usage of “apparition,” the mental picture of a “wet, black bough” appears because of the same look of the metro station, and the people themselves, in the moment of the author's observation, are equated to the “petals” that reside on said bough. 

This poem is a manifestation of refraction. As Ammons says, it reconciles the opposites of reality and the human mind, allowing the physical perception of the world to change direction in the mind of the poet and produce a novel image. Moreover, the poem is both specific in setting and appealing to the universal instincts of mental associations any reader has had in their life. Pound even refrains from using any verbs in these two lines in order to achieve this air of pure thought. The outcome of his bold decision to open up to the world is that Pound manages to catch the ‘sun bunnies’ in the most routine of surroundings, which proves the importance of the interaction between the poet and reality, and their common effort in creating refraction. 

The poem also implies that poetic refraction is a kind of scientific process, with its own premises and rules. One of these rules is to never forget that the light is falling on you. There is a notion, at times, of separating the final poem and the poet from the world. This notion’s proponents claim that it is necessary to make a distinction between the art and the artist. It supposedly allows a deeper appreciation of the properties of the work itself and makes it more relevant to everyone in the audience, rather than a segment of population in a single moment in the cultural and space-time continuum. However, as a firm believer in the poet's role as a prism, I note that the things connected by the poet are precisely the environment of their development and work and the poem itself. That is why it is the poet’s duty to be aware of where they came from and who shaped them as an author. 

In his essay from 1919 “Tradition and Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that “what is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.” For Eliot, it seems impossible, or at least extremely limiting, to consider the work of an individual creator in isolation from all their predecessors; he presents literature, including poetry, as an ever-renewing order, both temporary and perpetual. Therefore, aspiring writers should be aware of their place in relation to the past, be able to draw from it instead of rejecting it or trying to reinvent the wheel, because their work will inevitably become a part of an entire literary tradition. 

However, this remark about tradition should not turn into one’s following of all the rules of the past or – even worse – its imitation. Light, after all, never falls on the Earth in the same way, changing its position every second; thus to succumb to conformity is to abandon the very prism that the poet performs. Rather, they must learn to engage with previous knowledge, to be able to interpret it to suit their own perspective and needs; all of these will make the redirected light take on a new shape. Kimiko Hahn illustrates Eliot’s vision of tradition and my own idea about the poet’s awareness of his creative background in this poem:

[The whale already]

a golden shovel

    The whale already taken got away: the moon alone

    —Yosa Buson, translated by Hiroaki Sato

What is endangered, the

the rest of us ignore. the whale,

loved by children and cartoonists, already

dwindles. Bycatch has taken

them. The tiny creatures they consume haven't got

a chance to outlast the warming. A way

to safeguard whales is to deny ourselves the

discs and car exhaust. the moon

sees us at all cost alone.

This poem takes the form of a “golden shovel”—the last word of each line forms another poem from the past, to which the author pays tribute. The golden shovel form is thus an homage to the past; however, Hahn plays it up in a way that leaves room for the themes and images of the present too. An Asian poet, she acknowledges her Japanese literary roots and blends them with her American identity, situating the traditional haiku genre in a modern Anglophone poem. Moreover, haiku’s generally accepted themes of nature and philosophical contemplation are being transformed: “the whale/... already dwindles”, for instance, is now not a symbol of liberation, but the despair of slow extinction. The whales and “the tiny creatures they consume” become a personified image of the climate change issue and human indifference. In the original haiku, the presence of humans was implied in the very act of capturing a whale, but here humans get much more space in the narrative, loving the whales and doing nothing to “safeguard” them. Even the verb itself adds to the whale’s humanity, as well as to the sense that people neglect their duties. Finally, in the last lines, the moon is also able to perceive what is happening and is no longer alone. As in the original haiku, the moon sees the humans “at all cost.” Kimiko Hahn demonstrates an awareness of the light that she lets pass through herself, while remaining true to the issues that are relevant and interesting to her, creating a refraction-poem that sharply responds to the current environmental state of affairs. 

The second most important rule for considering poems as refractions is this: always remember the prism is essential. For instance, although Eliot emphasizes tradition and awareness of one’s place in the history of literature, he presents the poet as a neutral ingredient. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,” he writes, “but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”. For him, the trick is to distance oneself, to remove oneself from the equation; only in this way can the simple emotions and feelings of the author himself become significant and begin to live in the poem itself (Eliot). I disagree with this assertion: even though, according to my definition of a poem, the author also plays the role of a prism – a tool for changing the waves of light – it still exists. Upon looking even at my childhood prism, one can see small traces where the light has left marks on its smooth surface after years of touching it; and the beams resulting from these touches would not be the same if the prism had a different shape, or would disappear if I removed it altogether. Therefore, I propose not an escape, but a transformation of emotions, a kind of dispersion of light, which can only occur if the poet has an impulse, and then reflects on it. Under the influence of the environment, the poet forms general life experience, which helps to transform their impressions into a poem. I would go so far as to argue that it is the presence of the personality and specificity of the author's own experiences that makes the poem real. The point is to distill them: if the conditional light is not enough for the sunbeams, or, on the contrary, hurts the eyes with its intensity, the poet can keep the impressions that it left on them and try to use those impressions another time. By storing and analyzing emotions, the poet builds up the skill of discerning exactly which surfaces are suitable for which ray of light, and how to end up with a poem that has both elements of their voice and can exist in and of itself. “Hip-Hop Ghazal” by Patricia Smith embodies this position of the author and their emotions as key components of poetry just right:

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,

decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,

inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,

wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some.

Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets

killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off

what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips. 

This poem is saturated with emotions of rejoicing and pride. From the first line, Smith uses the expression “us brown girls”, and a little later, the AAVE term “sistas”, establishing her identity and indicating the closeness of the women around her, representing the Black community. Further, the poem becomes even more open and personal: the focus is on the hips, repeated in each stanza and described in increasingly revealing images. There are purely physical phrases like “cracking backbone” and analogies with machines like “engines grinding, rotating, smokin'”, and even exclamations like “woo” and “ooh wee”, all of which do not imply any detachment, but on the contrary, promote the right to enjoy the author’s own body and sexuality. The last line, in the tradition of the ghazal, mentions the author's real name and increases the level of intimacy even more; it also touches on the theme of personal faith with “what God gave you” and “say a prayer” as an address to Smith, presumably by one of the other women. The familiarity between them in this address, this demonstration of intimacy and mutual empathy, is inescapable, as is the author’s own prism. Patricia Smith sings of herself, and of other African-American women; her perception by others as constantly objectified is internalized in order to reclaim it and give herself freedom through this poem. Her emotions are still significant, as Eliot would have to agree; yet they are so not because of the escape or rejection of the author’s personality, but because of its embracing and reflection. From emotion and personality to the poet, from the poet to their refraction, the poem is transformed and enlivened. 

However, even if a poem is a refraction, the product of the poet's transformed interaction with reality, it is never a complete result. As the analogy with the prism suggests, refraction is the processing of eternal light, which can be reproduced in different forms. This is another reason why I choose to use this definition: for some unknown reason, we are all so fascinated by the light of the world that, no matter how much it hurts us, we continue to try to catch its ‘sun bunnies.’ In the hardest of times, when the only things light illuminates are the dirt and the dust, the war and the violence, we pick up a prism to become it; it feels like one of the most natural things in the world. We stand under the rays of light, reflecting it from our surfaces, and the room changes its appearance: it is terrifying and beautiful, and it is never what we expect it to be. Poetry – this surprising refraction – is one of our most reliable coping mechanisms, a way to make sense of what is happening, even if it is slightly distorted after the light waves change their direction.