What is Outdoor Poetry?
Outdoor poetry is meant to be an expression of the natural singing spirit. Our bodies desire to burst into spring and worship the world, and poetry should reflect this. Peruse literary magazines, however, and you will discover that the primary objective of many professional poems is not singing spirit but finely arranged esthetic. The cerebral has gotten elevated to art and treated like a gateway to profundity.
Could it be that this is wrong? Could it be that our focus should not be inward but outward? That we should attend not to an esthetic of the inner mind, but face outdoors to the great meadow around us?
Human life after all belongs outside; life is an outdoor enterprise. No surprise then that outside poetry engages us with the world, whereas inside poetry traps us in our thoughts.
We are not minds that happen to be embodied. Rather, we are bodies with minds: our primary identity is bodily. As bodies we come with wonderful sensations, moods, needs, desires, memories, thoughts; invaluable elements of our existence all, but their role is secondary.
We should celebrate consciousness in its myriad manifestations, but we should never forget that consciousness exists to benefit the body.
Bodies we are, first and foremost. Get this wrong, mistakenly elevate mind to primacy, and the result can be pernicious. When we find ourselves trapped indoors, caged in our mental cells, it leads to perversity.
So the goal is not poetry isolated from the body, alienated from the encompassing world in which we move and dance and breathe; we don’t want poems centered on metaphor and imagery at the expense of the natural cadences, rhythm, and sounds of human language.
It is curious.
We have a culture which worships music and singing — as the ubiquitous earbud demonstrates — but our infatuation with the inner seems to have driven the musical out of our literature. Like Narcissus we have fallen in love with our own mental reflection in the pond of consciousness, and forgotten about swimming in the pool of life.
We want to restore music to poetry and put the focus back in the right place. For this, outdoor poetry seeks language which escapes the mind and its endless self-reflection, language which grounds us in the body that dances.
To an extent, it’s a matter of spirit versus poetic expertise: give us the exuberant wildness of the untrained rather than the caged accuracy of the professional. Every poem should be imperfect, for life is the same. Imperfection imparts value, since experience must have troughs in order to have heights.
And this explains why heaven can never satisfy us, and Eden must harbor a snake in its garden of delight.
We want language that sways in the wind like weeds in a field. And as with life, we prefer our weeds on the wild side. We’d rather see them scattered chaotically in the meadow than artfully arranged in a vase on the table.
When done right, writing is a religious act and poetry is its Sunday service. And the real object of worship, as of old, is the sun herself. Worship not of the acquired cerebral consciousness we have locked inside our heads, but of this wonderful world of bodies which the sun annunciates.
