II. What Are Poets Trying to Describe?
Murielle: This connects with something Sourav Sengupta and I discussed several years ago. Sourav proposed a hierarchy of abstraction across the arts.
Architecture is visual, tactile and spatial. Sculpture removes one of those dimensions. Painting removes another. And poetry is perhaps the most abstract because ultimately you are left with the word.
That doesn’t make poetry superior. It makes the problem of communication more difficult.
A poet has very little material to work with. You’re trying to use language to communicate something that may not have existed in language before.
Loïc: And that’s why the question of what you’re trying to describe becomes important.
If you’re trying to describe something that you believe is shared — something about human experience, existence, suffering, perception — then I can imagine very strong bridges between science, poetry and art.
In all of these cases, you’re trying to create a vocabulary for something.
But if the movement becomes entirely inward — if you’re describing something that you believe only you can perceive, and you’re not concerned with whether anyone else can enter it — then the vocabulary may actually shrink.
You’re no longer building tools that other people can use to think.
Murielle: Yes. That’s exactly the distinction I’ve been struggling with.
I’ve thought about it in terms of two broad creative intentions: cathartic and non-cathartic creation.
Cathartic poetry begins with the need to express something. You see a flower and it makes you feel wonderful, so you write about the flower. Or you’re furious, heartbroken, suffering, and you write because expressing that emotion gives you relief.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We even have art therapy.
But we don’t have mathematics therapy.
Loïc: I would love mathematics therapy.
Murielle: Math therapy! [Laughs.] Exactly.
But that’s my question. If poetry remains primarily therapeutic — if its function is to unburden the person who creates it — what distinguishes the resulting work from the private emotional process that produced it?
Loïc: I don’t think suffering itself is the bridge.
Human beings already have much more efficient ways of unburdening themselves. We cry. We shout. Other living beings experience suffering too.
Writing is actually a very strange and inefficient way of simply getting rid of an emotion.
If you sit down and construct language around an experience, you’re already doing something else. You’re making something that can potentially be understood by another person. You’re transforming the experience into a structure.
So for me, the bridge isn’t suffering. The bridge is the desire to make sense of what we’re experiencing.
And I would go further: not simply making sense of it for yourself, but making sense of it for all of us.
Although I’m not even sure that distinction ultimately holds. If something makes sense to you and you can genuinely express it, perhaps it can make sense to all of us.
Murielle: Because the experience itself is shared.
Loïc: Yes.
Murielle: That’s an ontological way of understanding creation. The individual experience becomes a point of access to something larger than the individual.
Loïc: Exactly.
And maybe that’s where science and poetry meet. Both are, in different ways, building a vocabulary for what we’re experiencing.
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