On Poetry as Bestowal

I want to consider a poem as a ‘bestowal’. I use that word in preference to ‘gift’ – though the exploration of poetry as gift-making is, naturally enough, a deeply fruitful idea, and one many have explored. However, there’s an obsolete use of the word ‘bestowal’ as ‘lodgement’ or ‘stowage’. In this sense, a poem is both a gift to the reader and a location in which something is contained, kept, or deposited. I rather like this double meaning, because it unites the pleasure of exchange within a community and a sense of something being contained, even withheld, or treasured. It creates the sense of a container, or wrapper – and it’s fun (honestly) to read a poem thinking about its edges, what it brushes up against. Try it.

Naturally, the risk here is the continuing advocacy of the poet as someone outside of a community whose bestowing is more like lobbing in grenades of social justice, ethical opposition, or political judgement (or the avoidance of these, say, anecdotal pleasure or sheer whimsy). I mean, this sense of the artist lying outside of the social system is a performative necessity in all capitalist cultures – having the role of a sort of moral weathervane, or worse, moral blowhard – in order to maintain a social order and class control, our system (thesystem) needs and designates someone who critiques our collective inadequacies and then establishes a value system to purchase and own such critique – the punk ethic becoming the punk t-shirt. It is a drama where social truths can be displayed, even realised, but then departed from – as we head out of the theatre, back to the car park, and into the system we have just paid to be refuted. It’s more stimulating to consider the poet as someone inside the system – and to consider their role within the community. And to think about the poem as the product of its community, having both powers and functions. Not merely Benthamite utility, not quite the language of the herd, but a language born out of stowage and bequest – holding and giving. Being together, more than idolising (and commercialising) difference.

Quite what all this might mean becomes a form of cultural exchange and interrogation over time. After all, many of our little treasures end by being bagged up and dispatched to the charity shops – their value simply sifting away. And poems are rather like this, well, some of them, they come to embody a specific set of connections and pleasures for the reader, drawing upon their life experiences, locating for each us a separate sense of purpose, agency and identity in a text. We remember where we read it, whom we were with, the gains and losses of the day; the landscape and weather. The poem resonates and reticulates. And we shimmer with it.

And here is another opening for us: the idea that what is stowed isn’t just the poet’s experience but all shared experience that comes to rest upon the artefact of the poem. In this sense, we all come to invest a tiny bit of ourselves with the poem if not within it – at least for a little while. Another wrapper so to speak.

But the boundary of the text is permeable, too. The text is symbolic, it mutates over time (for words change). In fact, each reader brings a new sense of themselves to the text – quite the opposite of dissecting the syllabic components of the thing itself in a close-reading. In this respect, the poem is totemic and may come to represent something that does not lie inside its verbal artifice, but is transformed in one or other cultural moments, being read or owned by a cluster of readers with a common understanding or, in the absence of this, a shared mystery. And poems, like quantum physics, are mysteries, too. The poem is habitable.

Can it be said that the poem contained this possibility? Prefigured its use and interpretation? We know some forms of reading see the poem as a dead mass, trapped in its historic deterministic facts and processes, a corpus to be explored – of its time and not being enacted through time – but this fails to recognise the emotional and spiritual transference that is located along with the poem. Stowed, as it were, but not limited to itself. The poem is its reading in time, as well as its text in time.

Of course, the thing contained can be mutated in history – and we must reflect on the accidents of such potential meanings – where the art object comes to represent something else entirely – never mind our own misreading when words change or simply lose their currency. In fact, one might suggest that the poem contains all its own potential outcomes – and over time the reader, many readers, transfer and bestow such meanings.

It doesn’t happen in isolation, does it? It happens within a community of interpretation, and the theology of poetry is as disputatious as other flavours of theology.

It’s easy to see how a poem is also a contested space. Some readers, professional readers for sure, may prefer one usage, may claim it possesses the official meaning, or, more vaguely, the official approach to considering meaning itself. Others will argue the precise opposite – for example, that all North American poetry in English is colonial language, an emanation of exploitation from the British Isles. It could be argued that English is the preeminent colonial language, except for the fact that ‘Englishes’ are freely imported into each other around the world today and already form one strata of AI and its monolithic totalising nature. But this is a digression and another story…

Before we meditate on any of these meanings (i.e. gift, stowage and locus), and perhaps dispute them, I think it’s safe to say we can all agree that there are social, historical, political and spiritual dimensions to writing poems and making personal claims on the art. It seems obvious, doesn’t it – but it’s here that this essay finds its central concern – that poetry is synodal. And if it is, then its language, purpose and trajectory in history is derived from this consensual (if disputed) set of expectations and requirements. And that’s interesting to consider because it locates the poet not as an outsider developing discrete forms of critique about say identity and entitlement, rights and responsibilities, but as an insider articulating the purpose of the community for itself. Am I claiming that poetry is an insider art? Well, yes, in a way. At least, it’s worth thinking of it in this way.

Why should we care about any of these matters? Well, I think the idea of bestowal has one important impact. It means that the language of the poem needs to be communal, precise, and comprehensible, even if its ideas and contexts are highly complex and will naturally ramify. The more the language of a poem departs from this communal (shared) role – let’s say, for a moment, its liturgical role – the more depleted it will become. Or to expose this further, the more society will reject it; the more marginal it will become.

Art may be useless (i.e. beyond utility), but it isn’t purposeless. This isn’t a recidivist argument to establish a new prosody, but it opens poetry to a new consideration, that of its formal place as a liturgical language for its people. And here, we gain a new sense of what bestowal might mean for us all. And this is where my conjectures stop, and maybe yours begin.