Dale Tracy: On Gnomics

 

“A short pithy statement of a general truth; a proverb, maxim, aphorism, or apophthegm” (“gnome,” Oxford English Dictionary)

“< Greek γνώμη thought, judgement, opinion; plural γνῶμαι sayings, maxims (Latin sententiae), < γνω- root of γιγνώσκειν to know v. (“gnome, etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary)

I write and read poems to know about the world: this is a kind of experience and a way of learning. The poem opens up a line of thought, making it possible to think along it.

But what kind of experience and what kind of learning? Does poetry offer a specific kind of knowledge? I think so, but not in the sense that poetry is more powerful than other forms. I don’t think that poetry has special powers, except in that we need all the ways people think and create; each way has its own powers; and poetry’s powers need particular mentioning because poetry is a non-dominant form (in the time and place I write in).

The powers particular to poetry are its compression, which produces openness inviting active connection-making; its brevity, which produces a whole in which the network of connections is accessible and can be held by the eye or in the mind at once; its present-tense happening, which produces active presence that readers might feel they experience or participate in; and its self-awareness, which produces within the craft a commentary on the craft.

I’m not trying to produce binding criteria for poetry, though. This particularity can only be true in general, and not even in general for all kinds of poetry, and can also be true of prose. To discuss broad categories is only to speak of tendencies that can be anywhere but collect more here than there.

Do these tendencies collecting around the form we call poetry (at least the sorts of poetry I’m thinking of) produce a different kind of knowledge than that produced by what we call prose? I think that they do. Those tendencies—compression, brevity, presence, self-commentary—emphasize the “how” over the “what.” More than being about a subject, a poem is a way of thinking. In this way, a poem is a model for doing rather than an explanation of something, and so the experience of reading a poem can be an experience of learning from a model.

Does that sound right? (It’s a real question, and I welcome answers or other thoughts: dale.tracy@kpu.ca). In any case, this is how I have backwards-constructed an account of the poems in Gnomics.

Gnomics collects some of my most compressed poems, each mainly two or three lines long. They sound like riddles, use the form of syllogisms, or otherwise perform reasoning (sometimes faulty reasoning, testing logic’s misuse). These poems are a process of thinking or perform a process of thinking. If a poem is a process of thinking, it is this thinking (the thinking emerges from the poem as a process, animated by me). If a poem performs a process of thinking, it performs my thinking (makes my thinking happen as I write, then makes my thinking happen in you as you read, as an experience of thinking). Either way, these poems aren’t explaining an experience or subject but are or do thinking. I’ve named them “gnomes” to make us think of knowing in process.

 

 

 

 

Dale Tracy is the author of Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022), her first full-length poetry collection. She also wrote the chapbooks Lines That Open (Surrey Art Gallery, 2023), The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020), and Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018) and the academic monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017). She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Image credit: from Unsplash, Shubham Dhage