Meet the Dead Philosopher’s Society.

I’ve always been enamored of philosophy. I think my fascination with it began early when I realized I was more intelligent than 75% of the adults in my world. I was about 10 years old. I began to take an interest in chess as entertainment and logic problems as solitaire thinking games. It helped that my parents were rabid unorthodox fundamentalists along the order of the Four Square Gospel folks without the historical connection. I was always looked upon as the egghead in the family – the guy with the book smarts but no common sense. I thought then that if you could pick up a book and read then you had enough common sense to get by.

I always had a craving for meaning. I was a searcher. I read everything. I observed. Kept an eye over one shoulder, because all the rednecks in my neighborhood were bigger than me, and exercised my brain at every opportunity. I counted it as oiling the machine.

College was a virtual playground because it meant that I could study philosophy, write fiction (until I discovered poetry), and continue searching for meaning. I sometimes find it, but in very unusual places.

Over the years I’ve developed my own ideas on philosophy (and just about everything else). I’ve learned that all human action is a result of some philosophy. Most people are blind to the fact that they have unknown philosophical precepts that guide their actions. But I am too self conscious to let that reality slip by unnoticed. Sometimes I examine my own self examinations to make sure that I am not as crazy as my alter ego says I am.

In the middle of his interview, Simon Critchley the philosopher said this:

one of the outcomes of Romanticism for me is the idea of the writer as imago dei without a deus where art becomes a Promethean creation ex nihilo.

This is not a new idea, but it is a sublime idea. The idea that poetry is created from nothing. I’m not quite sure I agree with it, but sometimes when I am asked where I got a particular idea for a poem or where a particular poem may have come from, I find myself at a loss for an answer. I’m not really sure. I think that different poets have different processes for creating (at least I hope so) and I know that I don’t have any one process. Every poem is different. I don’t have a favorite chair or a favorite pencil. I don’t need to sit in the same corner every time and strain my eyes by the same light. I can pretty much write anywhere, though I find that I need solitude and “alone time” for the revision process.

I really think that all poetry is derived from an underlying philosophy. For some poets it is conscious and for others it isn’t. A poet does not necessarily have to know what their philosophical assumptions are in order to be guided them. In fact, most people – poets or not – are not aware of these assumptions. But they are there.

I believe that poetry is an extension of philosophical ideas. Poetics itself is a branch of philosophy and a poet that writes from a particular aesthetic rendering is simply acting on his assumptions, not just about literature but also about life. But that doesn’t mean that you can narrow down a poet’s philosophy of life from a single poem. It is much more complicated than that. I do believe that you can take a poet’s oeuvre and get a good snapshot of his philosophy, though sometimes that is difficult because we don’t always end up where we start.

I think the application here for poets is to tap into that place where you have your assumptions and examine them. It is important to do this on a regular basis. Not necessarily so that you can identify the bad ones and change them. But I think that if you are conscious of your philosophical assumptions and write with them in mind then your poetry will be stronger. When you look at your work in the revision process and see incongruities with your own philosophical framework then you can fix that much more easily. But if you never examine your assumptions and you continue to write then you’ll eventually reveal a sort of laziness that makes for really sloppy poetry. At least, that’s the way it’s been for me.