This post is for anyone who has ever felt like they don’t get poetry. Like they can’t enter into it.

Originally shared by Mac Vogt

This post is for anyone who has ever felt like they don’t get poetry. Like they can’t enter into it.

Rainer Maria Rilke is a hugely famous poet from the last century and “Entrance” is one of his most famous poems. Might be the best poems I know (the other being Billy Collin’s ” Introduction to Poetry” [http://goo.gl/tVZKBs]) for entering into poetry.

By each step into evening, the poem simulates a reading of poetry, of itself. Poetry is impression, the invention before the will to meaning. Will vs eye. The word that grows ripe in silence — slender and alone.

Poetry is a kind of thought, but more lived in than practical. Oftentimes more Rorschach ink blot than fiction or essay. Maybe you could say poetry operates by a grammar of resonance?

Tarkovsky says, “Of course, he is a philosopher in a relative sense. As Paul Valery observed, ‘Poets are philosophers. You might equally well compare the painter of sea-scapes to a ship’s captain.'”

(Lol @ nested quote in a quote!)

Heidegger writes, “Singing and thinking are the stem neighbors of poetry./ They grow out of Being and reach into its truth.”

So if Entrance simulates its reading and opens up deeper experiences of the self, maybe in this neighborhood, relatedly, according to the Self-model Theory of Subjectivity [http://goo.gl/nQxo94] the self might end up being what simulates and emulates itself too.

Ah, getting ahead of myself. It’s something I want to write about soon. In the meantime, does anybody know any other poems I should know about that are good entrances to poetry? ?