GUIDELINES FOR POETRY:
DRAGONS AND HUMAN PERCEPTION

by Jared Smith

 December, 2000

Those of us who have walked in the mountains recognize each other by the words we use and by the wisdom we carry in our eyes.  The words we use are tough and craggy, but filled with the fleeting imagery of spring flowers.  They are built of images that flow from the backbone of our continent and ghost outward with snowmelt toward our farthest shores.  They are brittle and forlorn like a wisp of weed caught in a strand of barbed wire fence; or like a hungry man standing lost in his own backyard and looking toward the horizon.

These are words that form images that go far beyond books and schoolrooms.  They are openings into a time that is past and is still to come; that is ageless.

This is where poetry is born; in this ageless dimension that we touch only briefly while looking out across the wilderness at sunset.  Poetry is not rational.  It is not linear thought.  It cannot, in its truest form, be bent into troches or anapests or iambic pentameters unless those traditionalist measures are inherent in the particular line of earth or the particular frame of mind that we are involved in.  And then the art, the poetry, lies not in shaping the language to fit the moment, but in feeling our way to the language that best represents what we are at that time and space.  Our craft and our skill, therefore should not be driven to present our work in scholastic manner, but to use every sense at our disposal to claw and scratch a map and a marker so that others may come after us and feel what we have felt.  It must be precise; not flowery.  It is organic poetry in the extreme; raw and shaped as nature shapes our wildest perceptions and imperceptions.  It is natural and cutting as the sand that slips away beneath our feet as we climb.  It can sing and rhyme, or it can crash like boulders as they smash down against the mountains that supported them.

What is key is that the poetry not crash when it should sing; and not sing when the world it comes from cries.  We will recognize reality in its language when we see it.

Others in the past have called this poetry of association.  When Robert Bly was known only as a poet in the 60s, he wrote an essay called “Looking for Dragon Smoke.”  In that essay, he spoke of ancient poets such as Li Po, and Pindar, and The Beowulf Poet.  He spoke of them as riding on the backs of dragons.  Where the dragons stood, the poets could look down and see their scaly claws dug into the peaks of mountains, and could feel secure in that solid imagery.  And yet, a moment later, the dragons would sail off into the mist filling the valleys between mountain peaks.  There would be nothing but grayness and mist.  And then the dragons would set down upon another mountain peak—another solid image—and the dragons with their scaly claws and the poets with their words would grasp that new image and hold it tightly.  They would clutch it to themselves and compare it with the image they held before.  But the poetry, the magic, the association, would happen between the peaks.  It would happen naturally and in its own language between the images that the poet could see.  Any man or woman who climbed upon those dragons and flew out among the mountains and landed on those peaks and images would feel the same mist and the same magic as the poet, but would have no other words for what had happened than the images and the space between them.

The poem would have no meaning.  It would be a feeling, a realization.  It would have a life of its own, and would be strong enough to batter through the layers of civilized linear thought we have built our cities around, and take us back into our natural world.

What of the intellect then?   Many poets have great intellects, and cannot leave them to wander aimlessly like lost bears batting their way through deserted cabins.  The imagists and impressionists may have felt otherwise, but the intellect is a portal to our perceptions.  It is a window and a filter that reflects back all that we have seen and experienced in the workplace, in the schools, and in the hills.  To ignore it is to be lost in limbo.

No, the secret is to hold the intellect in check so that it is only another one of our senses, and is not strong enough to overwhelm our other senses and build the facades we so easily hold in place in polite company.  After all, The Niebelungenlied, an early Germanic epic that Wagner built his Ring Cycle around, was an experiential study in balancing the intellect with control and with magic.  In that majestic work, only the equal balancing of all three—as represented by Gunter, Hagen, and Sifrid—could allow man to experience reality.  When the magic on the frontiers of civilization was prevented from interacting with the ruling intellect, when the intellect was given too much control, the dragons disappeared and the hero was slain.

As T.S. Eliot showed a generation ago, the images of the intellect can be as powerful as any images we may see.  Connecting the spaces between those images is as powerful as connecting the spaces beneath the peaks of Li Po’s dragons.  As Eliot defined his objective correlative, the sequencing of those images will cause one and only one inescapable feeling within the reader.

We have drawn examples from and quoted a number of great writers.  Do we think then that they are writing for today better than our members could write?  Do we expect T.S. Eliot and Li Po to submit poems for our readership?  No, we do not expect to talk with the dead, though, I guess if they called we might listen.

This is the kind of poetry we will look for in Trail & Timberline.  It is living literature, not repetition of the masters who have been before us.  Goodness knows, there will be failures in our attempts to bring this to you.  There will be many failures among all of our readers and writers as we attempt to create these dramatic escapes into reality.  It is a terrifying thing to look down from a dragon that is wheeling over the mountain peaks, twisting and trying to breathe fire upon its captor, but it is a wonderful thing to attempt.  We are looking for poets who have read the masters, who have walked the timberline by themselves, and have found their own visions with all the tools available to them—and who are willing to struggle with the eloquence necessary to communicate those visions to all of us who are still sitting here by the fireside, trying to get our snowshoes on.

The poets who achieve the kind of poetry we would ultimately like to find may never have been born.  I’ll bet they have been though.  We may not get the perfect poem; we may not even come close, but we’ll recognize the kind of poetry that is ruggedly individualistic and pays homage to the world about us.   That poetry will come from the mountains, and the knowledge it brings with from schoolrooms or where ever else, will marked with the sweat stains and the dust that fill their backbacks.  That poetry will come in filled with vital imagery and devoid of hollow generalities.  It will not preach to us; it will speak to the marrow in our bones. 

If we can’t feel it, touch it, taste it, or remember it, we won’t publish it.  If we like it, we will.

Jared Smith is poetry editor for Trail & Timberline magazine.