That is, we are potentially elevated into higher states by poetry. And if poetry does have power to transport or otherwise alter the mind, it must do so by triggering something inside us capable of being moved (as in Longinus 65-7 and Kant 129-30 also see Wassiliwizky et. ” Ginsberg modifies “visionary” to “anything that teaches nature,” but the notion of poetry as a catalyst to mental states, visionary or not, is a critical point (“Craft Interview” 70). In fact, Whalen’s friend, Allen Ginsberg remarked in 1974 that he saw “the function of poetry as a catalyst to visionary states of being. The idea that poetry involves a “high kind of consciousness” and conveys feelings about-or may even induce-heightened states isn’t discussed much but goes back at least to Longinus (2, 32-3, 71) perhaps into antiquity, and it finds important instances in poets like Rimbaud and Yeats. ” Whalen closes the topic by saying that “with any luck at all when a person reads the stuff he’ll get some feeling about that existence or that understanding or that excitement.” Such experiences, Whalen posits, contribute to “the habit of hearing and seeing that is the basis of poetry or is actually poetry because after all poetry is a description of this high kind of consciousness. ” Here, I’d mark “breakthrough,” for it occurs again. To underscore the point, he further speaks of a “small satori vision” at four years old, when he entered a room where his toys were being kept and noticed “something about the relationship between those windows and the light and the floor and the closet where the toys were that all made a funny kind of poetical breakthrough. That his initial poetical experience involved an altered state of mind and an ether vision may not surprise readers-Whalen’s use of psychedelics is no secret-yet note how he frames his response in terms being initiated into poetry, and that the experience was in itself “poetical,” perhaps because of the transformation he underwent. I suppose that one of my first poetical experiences was that of having my appendix burst and having an emergency operation and being in the hospital the first time and having an ether vision of great enlightenment and also a physical experience of light as itself and an odd feeling of the total meaningfulness and rightness of existence. Just beyond two minutes into his NET interview for the film series USA: Poetry, a relatively trim, focused Phil Whalen responds to an off-camera question, likely about how he began writing poetry.
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