Poems On Happiness

An Interview with Matthew Henriksen

Johannes argued that I wanted to put the reader through a sort of violence of experience, and he also called me a Romantic. Then he called himself a Romantic after explaining that some people don't want to "go there" when reading poetry. Of course, I agree with Johannes on those counts, but I contend that people who don't want to "go there" might as well not read poetry. Yes, I want to be devoured by experience, but I don't have any illusions about transcending it. We live in a closed world, regardless of our ideas. Our ideas themselves form part of the boundary between the known and the unknown. Sadness and joy arrive from the same source: that we cannot encounter the closed world in its entirety. We can't know everything, but we can experience intensely. I believe what Walter Pater said art does: heightens experience and so makes the most of our moments. When I ask my two-year-old daughter if she's hungry, I impose a mandate on the language so I can get a necessary result. Why impose mandates on poetry when each image offers an infinite playground? Bees as imagery provoke an untranslatable experience through the variety of sensory appeals. No bee is going to devour me, but the imagination allows us to "go there." The sound of bees buzzing resembles the sensations of multiple stings. The imagined stings remind me of putting my bruised thumb in cold water. The cold water can awake a sensation that might suggest the numbness of the empty universe burning with so many stars like needles in a foot numb as a pincushion. Each experience contains an aspect of the infinite. I don't want to "go there" when it's time for my daughter's lunch, but I don't comprehend another purpose for poetry. People who talk about meaning in poems and then put quotation marks around the word are not reading poetry. Language, like any aspect of experience, can't avoid meaning. The word "thumb" contains infinite associations, some of which we can't verbalize, but poetry can evoke meaning beyond language. Most contemporary narrative and rhetorical poems bore me because they limit themselves to statement, but the lyric can tell a narrative of perspective through immersion in an experience and can convey rhetoric by superimposing the poem's perspective over the reader's senses. I don't want my poems to deform anyone. I'd like to smash the deformed notions we too often wear as protective goggles. It would take exactly one bee to devour me.

The Hedonic Treadmill – The Pursuit of Happiness | Poems at The ...

You've hit all the notes and then for good measure tap danced up and down the keyboard. I've come to the conclusion that Homo sapiens is hard-wired funny. We do what we do because we just can't help ourselves -- and we are the sole species which performs so out-of-whack with intuitive sense. I write of it lots. Here's part of a piece of mine touching on the subject:

The older girl saw you do it

That sums me up at this moment in time.

This particular scribble was less clever than others. It is a summary of many of the philosophers and writers on the theme of the pursuit of happiness (confused with /hedonism) taken from my copious notes. And as ever it carries deeper meanings and roots.

Happiness, poems

Lasting happiness, poems

Thoughts, Quotes and Poems on Happiness

The mansion of happiness, poems

The shoes of happiness and other poems, the third book of verse