Spatial Structure of Poetry

(above image from the blogpost  "A story in waiting" on dagagiri dated Nov. 29, 2008)

The trickling water
From the air conditioner pipe
A sparrow gulps down.

(an attempt at Haiku, Anuj Daga)

***

Poetry essentially consists of fractured statements. The empty space between the word-constructions allow for new grammars to configure. It is the suspended grammar that perhaps makes space for new.imagination to take place. The emptiness sometimes brings two stranger words / ideas close together allowing us to.see different dimensions of existing worlds.

If consecutive words of a dictionary were to be read as a sentence, they would give us a great way to look at the landscape of words and meanings. Since if we consider that the dictionary is the modernist way of word family structures, consecutive words in a dictionary are neighbours belonging to a same family - in terms of physical characteristics, the alphabets (genes) they are constructed out of; the pronunciations of syllables (body parts), etc. However, their ages may be different with regard to their etymologies and they may have different meanings, functions and behaviours.

Such a landscape of words may become an extremely interesting investigation. Poetry is thus a landscape of words, creating new meanings and relies on the readers' potential to be able to make sense if such landscape for the interpretation of the real existing world. If architecture was poetry, it could possibly be very postmodern...bringing together different ideas and symbols together. But then there is rhythm, rhyme and spatial experience too at play. This would mean finding meaning into the empty spaces, pauses or fractures between words of a poetry.