On Poetry

Poetry is a reflection of our true nature and how we historically have seen ourselves. Poetry cannot occur before the primordial split that made us human. Our mating song split into music and language, which returned to each other as song and poem. Language without music is prose; language with music is poetry. Line breaks do not make a poem. There are literary works of prose with line breaks, and there are poems without line breaks. Line breaks aid a poem's memorization: the rhythm syncs with the brain's waves, repetitions aid in memory through giving meaning, and line breaks allow the poem to fit into the short-term memory slot for more efficient memory-processing. This is how memory is the mother of the Muses, as the Greeks correctly knew (and we've forgotten).

Poetry reunites language and music and is thus a return to the primitive pre-human. Yet it is also the mind's most elevated way of thinking. The way up and the way down are the same (Heraclitus). The Greeks said Zeus (God) is the father of the Muses. Humans are said to be halfway between animals and angels -- poetry returns us to the animal to elevate us to the space between man and God. THe divine is inseparable from true poetry, just as the body is inseparable from it. The body dances to music the way language does in poetry. Here the Sufis have it right: dancing brings us closer to God. It's no coincidence the founder of the Sufis was a poet.