I have a little book about poetry and thinking that I return to over and over. It is called Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. I have read, over the years, a number of books about poetry but it remains my favourite.

When I first opened the book, it was to the first essay. By Dennis Lee, it is called “Body Music: Notes on Rhythm in Poetry.” The first bit of the title is OK but the second?  Bland. But then…

What makes a poem cohere? How does it mean what it means?

It starts where the poem does: in the preverbal flex and coherence the words arise from. A poem tries to enact that wordless tumble and surge in its own medium – in line breaks and pauses, syntax and sound, the ripple and clarion strut of sense on the page. It tries to recreate the cadence of how things are, through the nitty gritty of craft.

I was hooked.

Because, I suppose, of my sensory oddities, I completely understood what he meant by “the preverbal flex and coherence.” The craft bit, well…that’s work.

The next bit of the essay – “But how do you get a handle on that? How can you understand technique as more than just a bag of tricks? As witness, and cosmology, and desire?”

What follows are moments like these:

– It starts with rhythm, that much I know.
– A poem thinks by the way it moves.
– What the poem mimes is not a static structure, but an active cohering. Kinetic rhythms of being. A cosmophony, more than a cosmology.
– Free prosody says, the world is coherent – but its coherence emerges in the interplay of variable systems of order. There is no absolute measure which antedates the poem. Coherence is local, provisional, contingent in the flux.
– For you are not just a self-contained subject /observer – you’re embedded in kinaesthetic space.

And that’s just the first essay.