What Is It Like To Be a Poet?
by Özge Lena
When the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked what it was like to be a bat, he pointed to something profound about consciousness—that there is a particular feeling, a subjective experience to being any kind of creature, and that it is truly impossible to see reality from another being’s ‘eyes’. A bat’s exclusive experience of the world through echolocation is so foreign to us that we can barely imagine it. Then I would like to ask: what about the consciousness of us as poets—what is it like to be a poet? What inner experience unveils our poetic consciousness that transforms mundane perception into artistic verse?
Poet Alice Oswald gives us a clue when she says, “The Greeks thought of language as a veil which protects us from the brightness of things; I think poetry is a tear in that veil.” This image of language as a thin yet protective barrier between us and reality’s raw intensity, even its density, tells us something essential about both ordinary consciousness and the poet’s special way of seeing and being in the world.
The poet exists in a unique state of highly sensitive awareness, living in the misty land between language and raw experience. Just as a bat’s consciousness is organised around echolocation, a poet’s consciousness lies around linguistic and imagistic resonance—seeing how one thing echoes into another, catching the harmonics between seemingly disparate formations, patterns, and experiences. The poet, then, must learn to exist in vulnerability, in the delicacy of remaining open to the world’s “brightness” that most instinctively shields themselves from.
People rightfully tend to live behind this veil of language by using words as labels, shortcuts, classifications, as ways to organise and manage the experience simply so as to communicate. Because naming anything is also taming it by familiarising. But the poet deliberately tears holes in this veil of ordinary language to see past the comfortable namings, to the stunning reality beneath, with a distinctive perspective. As John Berger states in the Ways of Seeing, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.”
This is why poets often struggle with language, twisting and breaking normal speech patterns, inventing new compounds, even new words, and discovering unexpected metaphors by trying to tear through the veil of casual language to dig out a glimpse of what can be seen on the other side of reality, the truth beneath the truth, the burning core of it.
Being a poet means developing a kind of multiple consciousness where reality lies in layers and the concrete world constantly shimmers with potential meanings and connotations. We poets must remain aware of language and its important daily functions while simultaneously seeing through it to the raw experience beneath. We must know how to use the veil of language while also knowing how to tear it. The poet must learn to move back and forth between casual consciousness and this more acute state of awareness. We must know when to let the veil protect us and when to tear it aside.
Here, the poet’s relationship with language becomes paradoxical. If “everything is a question of language” as Ingeborg Bachmann states, then it’s clear that we simply have language to point out the limitations of language; we only have words to show us what lies beyond words. This density of meaning is what makes poetry poetry. We tear the veil to show us both the protection it offers and the way it blinds us.
Unlike Nagel’s bat, which navigates through the echoes, the poet navigates through metaphor and imagery by developing a kind of extra-sensory perception that allows to detect connections—the subtle images in the rhythm of everyday life. When a poet tears the veil, normality peeks through this hole to see itself with new eyes.
This is why reading a beautiful poem can feel like seeing the world anew. For a moment, we share the poet’s consciousness through the poet’s sui generis self-bleeding into the poem. We see through that unique tear in the veil of language to experience reality with fresh intensity in a magnificent density. We look up from the poem to find that ordinary things—trees, birds, faces—seem strange and wonderful again.
To be a poet, then, is to live in this tension between the veil and the tear, between the protection of ordinary language and the brightness that lies beyond it. It is to exist in a constant state of translation—not just from experience to language, but from the individual to the universal, from mundane to the sacred, from the tear in the veil to the moment of repair. It is to develop the skill of seeing through our most basic tool for understanding the world, which is to learn to use language to point beyond language itself through the self, living and writing in this endless yet enchanting paradox.
References:
Bachmann, I. (1959-60). Frankfurter Vorlesungen: Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Piper Verlag.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.
Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat. Philosophical Review, 83, 435-450.
Oswald, A. (2016). The Art of Poetry No. 97 (Interview). The Paris Review, 219.
AUTHOR BIO
Özge Lena is an Istanbul-based poet & writer. Her poems have appeared in various countries including the UK, USA, Canada, Bangladesh, Iceland, Serbia, and France. In 2023, she was nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her ecopoem “Undertaker” is forthcoming in the Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War Anthology of Scarlet Tanager Books in the USA in 2025. Özge’s poetry was shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize in 2021, then for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023, and for the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize in 2024.
Read beautiful new poetry by Özge Lena in Katabatic Circus (Volume 1)
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