THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF ORDER: CRITICAL & PERSONAL ESSAYS

When a friend of mine asked me about the city of Istanbul, where I was living at the time, I wrote back (in part): It’s the once-and-future seat of empires, ruled over, inhabited by Turks, who speak a language not included on any Indy-Euro chart, unmapped linguistic waters, their island lies there, they go sailing about too much they can’t understand or be understood. And so within the Ural-Altaic they remain, drinking their vodka-clear, licorice-sweet raki, which goes cloudy white when poured over ice, and therein see their uncertain and mostly unhappy futures, but as they sober up, they forget what they saw in their glasses, and so they’re back at it the next night in the Istanbul bars, learning the secret of everything to come and forgetting it again. Undeterred, undisturbed, they go on speaking their impenetrable language & drinking their sweetish strong drink and answering the call of Allah five times daily.

I make no claim that this is poetry, but it’s closer to poetry than an entry in a Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia. There’s not all that much of informational value here; rather, it’s a mood, an ambience being conveyed. Indeed, there is misinformation (I’m sure the Turks don’t really see the future in their drinks). The letter dodges empirical quantities and approaches the city from the right side of the brain, offering—instead of population statistics or square miles covered—a foreigner’s impression of the city.

When things fit neatly into their allotted spaces, when they are clearly delineated and criss-crossed with a grid of longitude and latitude (rigidly proud in its perfection of purpose), when they are countable or quantifiable, then we are closer to the prose end of the spectrum. When what we want to convey seeps under closed doors, when it descends as mist, when meaning refuses to take a definite shape or overflows the vessels in which we’ve tried to contain it, then we’re dealing with the pole where poetry has planted its flag.

I’ve mentioned a few general characteristics, the way a wanted poster without a photo or an artist’s sketch might list blond hair, blue eyes, height, weight, etc. Quite a few men or women may fit the description without being the one the authorities are hunting down. I would need much more to pin down precisely what distinguishes prose from poetry. Fortunately, pinning it down precisely is well beyond the scope of this essay. In fact, if T.S. Eliot is right, no one is likely to pull that off. As he said in his introduction to Paul Valery’s The Art of Poetry, “I have never come across a final, comprehensive, and satisfactory account of the difference between poetry and prose.” What I’m hoping to do is simply to point, to suggest the likely direction in which our elusive quarry has fled.