I had a professor back in the day who used to say, “The poetry isn’t in the words. It’s everything in between the words.” And I believe poetry is what happens inside the reader as a result of the piece.
Poetry is the finesse, the connotations we derive, the emotional and intellectual resonance that results from the words that are read or spoken. In essence, the words are just the spell. The poetry is the actual magic.
Dealing with some stressful matters in her life, Kyrla came over the other night for wine and cuddles, a service I greatly enjoy providing to friends. Though we mostly discussed Kyrla’s love life, Skyspook and I had just returned from Power eXchange Summit, and I was brimming over with excitement over the weekend, and at one point the conversation turned to our Master/slave dynamic. “I don’t get it at all,” Kyrla said. “But I’m happy for you guys, and he takes great care of you.”
“Just think of it as a magical spell we’re casting over our relationship,” I believe I said. It’s what I meant to say anyway. I’d had 2 glasses of J’s Muscat, and I am an incredible lightweight. “It can look like complete bullshit from the outside, but it does something to us.”
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Suddenly, within this new context, the importance of protocol, formality, ritual becomes evident – in the way that form matters even within free verse – meter, assonance, consonance, prosody, acoustics. While some acts of love will always have that surprising burst, that spontaneity akin to imagism, like an animal released into the wild never to be seen again, still others will resurface in the round with the near maddening drive of a villanelle, reassuring and haunting and omnipresent, easily brought to the surface, conjured by the familiar strains of protocol, of ritual.
What is important is that we define these. We design this relationship together. And while it might seem like nonsense to uninvolved parties, it makes profound sense to the two of us, a kind of meta-sense.
And that is truly magical.