A Poem with an Aura?

A chance remark at Alice Oswald’s Poetry Conversation at Sharpham Trust in Totnes last week has been wandering round my head with its hand in the air. Wading in at the very muddy deep end of my curiosity, and without any written proof... Rudolf Steiner apparently said when you recite a poem its aura clings to you.

First, what is an aura? 

Interweb gives a sense of aura as the total energy field surrounding a body, and also of that energy field externally representing internal qualities of a mind.

So can a poem have a total energy field? Can it externally represent internal qualities of mind? And how does reciting a poem allow its aura to cling to you? This is the closest I can find from Steiner himself:

Christian Morgenstern’s... poems have aura... Many sounds in his poems... are surrounded by an aura; it radiates out from them. These poems are as though spoken out of the lands of the spirit... [giving] from out of the spiritual worlds what it could not give him in his physical body. And this power was so faithful, it would not rest until it had not only lifted him high into life, but also had put him on the path, up there at the high peaks of life where death loses its sting and the world regains its divine meaning.

High praise for poetry as a road to ‘divine meaning’, but without splitting existence into separate spiritual and physical ‘lands’ it’s still good to ask how and why poetry lets us experience beyond ourselves. Poetry is more than just recounting a memory or accessing deep imagination; prose often does those things better. What defines poetry, to an extent, are music and form, and if a poem were to have a total energy field it would be created by the way sound and meaning are stirred up within its boundaries. If a poem can have an aura, Steiner is right that it must be situated in its ‘sounds’.

Think of a mantra – ‘that which protects the mind’, or even, ‘an instrument of mind.’ Mantra meditation makes you conscious of sound vibrations moving through your body, and the positive, potentially spiritual effect those vibrations have on your mind and emotions. Sound waves literally touch the fluids and hairs inside the ear to create electrical energy that we process as sound. Anne Fernald calls this ‘touch at a distance’ when describing the melodic patterns that parents almost universally use to communicate with their newborns. Different pitches and volumes create physical comfort or discomfort in our cells: compare the rise-fall of praise (‘well done’/’good girl’) that soothes, with the sharp strikes of caution (‘stop’/‘don’t’) that are physically uncomfortable to listen to. A poem works in the same way to soothe or shock, amassing and releasing energy along its form by building up or breaking flows of sound. I can picture Mimi Khalvati tracing one of my poems in the air as she edited it during an Arvon course – her hand floating backwards and forwards and then stopping where my music got lost. The hand jumped about in the air until it could flow again on the smooth last line. Is that how it works in our ears when we write? Would a poem with an aura keep that hand flowing throughout?

But this discussion also began with the word recite: an act of repetition – in mantras, in parental cooing – that grows a sound’s resonance in us. Here is Alice Oswald on the importance of learning poetry by heart:

It isn't possible to understand poetry, which is a musical skill, without hearing and internalising some of its tunes... Poems, unlike prose, are memory efficient. That doesn't just mean they go easily into the memory and stay there. It means the memory goes easily into a poem and grows there, perhaps indefinitely.

I like this idea of memory actively going into a poem – as though memory were electricity and a poem a well-made circuit. Perhaps the brain finds it easier to let comfortable vibrations through, I don’t know?

Radiolab has a wonderful piece on memory that doesn’t answer that question, but does help to explain the value of reciting poetry. ‘Whenever you first build a memory it’s an act of cellular construction’ – the information is stored in protein. But every time we remember we recreate the original memory in an act of imagination, in the context of today, adding to and ever so slightly altering the memory base. This means the more we remember something the further we get from it. With an ordinary memory – an image or a touch that no longer exists – this is like a loss. But a poem stays intact in its form, the words do not change while we go on adding layers of our own experience. Rather than being depleted the poem grows each time we remake it in our minds: its sound vibrations more at home in us, its meanings amassing real resonance.

How do you make a poem with an energy field? With an aura? One that sticks in your mind? Earlier, wondering what makes a poem so delicious to memory, I noticed a new tweet on the Radiolab homepage: ‘Hearing is the fastest sense, faster than cognition.’ This seems to help somehow. As though the ears are in charge of what we take in, and poems play first to the ears, second to the mind. I don't know much about auras but I do know my poems aren’t complete until they are fixed in memory. I don’t trust them until my mind has them tight in its grip, until they replay of their own accord, inadvertently appearing on my lips while I’m washing up.