Writing the Unwritable

There’s a phrase used in Berel Lang’s book, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, that refers to the events of the Holocaust: “unspeakable, ineffable, incomprehensible, indescribable”. It strikes me – and apologies for the appropriation – that on a wider case, part of the task of poetry is to find and give expression to the “unspeakable, ineffable, incomprehensible, indescribable”.

Of course, this is a self-prescribed task: it is not a prerequisite of the genre, or the expressed desire of every poet. The act of poetry itself does not demand this of the writer, but it is perhaps in poetry where we can find the tools to best give us the means of stepping towards speaking, comprehending, describing and effability (In linguistics, the Principle of Effability asserts that every natural language can express any human thought).

There is a saying amongst us: “poetry is cheaper than therapy”. Therapeutic writing is in itself a distinct genre, but if we imagine a Venn diagram with a therapy circle and a poetry circle, the overlap can be nearly whole, depending on what you want to get out of your writing. If we’re looking just for therapy, our writing might be looser, rawer, less refined. We’re not necessarily concerned with cadence or rhyme or structure or any of the other myriad of techniques that comprise poetry. We are concerned with the process, the act of exploration and consideration, and recording what we might find. (I had originally typed ‘find on the war front’ and then ‘find on the battlefield’, but concluded that while we might be seeking to describe violence at times – trauma, mental anguish, eyewitness accounts, etc – the process of confronting these does not have to be violent, but can be explored in safe places, with support networks at hand if required.) With poetry, we then take this raw material and consider how to use language to best express our thoughts. For some, it is enough to stop at the raw material, to have mined that far is already an accomplishment, and can be hard earnt. For us poets, now that we’re earnt the clay, we must sculpt with it.

An important disclaimer: poetry is not all about inner-reflection, or looking into the abyss or oneself, or war, or trauma. A poem about a sunset can be as valid as a poem about life in the trenches. Yet it is the challenge of description that draws us in: if I want to describe a sunset in a way that has not been considered and written about before, I could also want to take this discipline and seek to describe what might be deemed by others as ‘indescribable’. If there is a mountain face that once was deemed unscalable, there will be a mountaineer that pledged to try and find a way to climb it.

The danger is that people think that the poetry is in the drama. But poetry doesn’t happen because of dramatic events: it happens in how you convey those events. Equally, you may feel that you have nothing to write about, that your life is not exciting or dramatic enough. But you do not need to change what you are looking at: you just need to change how you look at it, and poetry is all about the ‘how’. The ‘what’, the subject, can be anything. How you bring the reader to understand or consider the ‘what’ is the challenge all poets should face.

If I throw out everything that has been written already about a sunset, all the stock phrases and clichés and trite greeting card terms, then suddenly a sunset has become “unspeakable, ineffable, incomprehensible, indescribable”. How can I comprehend the setting sun if I don’t have the vernacular to do so? The answer is, we invent a new vernacular. Is the sun like an egg yolk in the sky? No, because that’s been done before, and we do not elevate our language when we rely on the first cliché that comes to mind. The sun is the colour that haunted Van Gogh, that he could never capture in a thousand sunflowers; that despite all the paint and supplies his brother Theo sent him, Vincent could never outdo the mystical fusion at the heart of our cosmos. Now, perhaps that’s not wholly brilliant or original, but it is a step up from ‘egg yolk’.

What about the truly unspeakable, the dark side of humanity that can overwhelm a person? Is this subjective, is one person’s mutism another person’s talkaholism? We can only begin to speak of the unspeakable when we are ready to face it, and even then, the degree to which we are capable of speaking may still be severely shackled. And those shackles may remain, no matter how verbose we normally might be, how many big words we have at our disposal or if we know the different between an envoi and a tornada. (If you don’t know the difference, it doesn’t matter.) Poetry can help us find a form to express within, but does it make us any more ready or willing to express? Can it overcome psychological barriers, suppressions, denials and fears? Without being an expert, I would say it depends on the degree of trauma, but it has been shown to be useful, with many poets attesting to poetry’s “healing powers”, or that poetry saved their life, or that it helped reframe previously uncontrollable emotions.

Poetry is a form of storytelling. The narrative might not have a start, middle or end, there might not be characters who move from point A to point B, but it still relays information, it still captures a thought about a ‘thing’, if that thing is as concrete as a sunset, or as abstract as some kind of trauma. We must ask ourselves: what do we mean by ‘trauma’? What happened? How did it feel like? How does it feel now? If I say the phrase ‘a beautiful sunset’ to someone who has never seen a sunset before, it isn’t going to mean much to them. If I instead show them a sunset, then they now have a shared experience, and can begin to understand us. With writing, we must show the reader: don’t tell them “it was beautiful”, or “it was traumatic”, but show them the details that created the beauty and the trauma. The showing is the story, and as storytellers, we are in control of the story: what we say, and how we say it.