The Metaphysics of Poetry
I'll take your professional word for it; I'll trade you my layman-poet word.
:joke:
when I read Lao Tzu, I am trying to receive the message he sent 2,500 years ago. A message intended to transmit an experience from his mind into mine. — T Clark
As an appreciator of the Tao Te Ching, I'll mention 1) the line between poetry and philosophy for the ancients is more blurred than now, as I know you know. and 2) (as I'm sure you know) translating ancient Chinese to English with any semblance of coherency is no small task. So, already, the odds are against you receiving what the author of the Tao Te Ching might have intended (assuming they intended any single, cogent meaning). There are just so many factors, even just within the interpretation of current English poetry, for instance. I'm not highlighting all of this confusion for the sake of confusion, but just for the sake of an ironic
clarity; the clarity that poetry doesn't work clearly. And the Tao Te Ching can't be classified as poetry in the same way that modern English poetry is classified, for us modern English speakers. All we can do is appropriate it to our way of reading what we think of as poetry.
So, in my view, it doesn't matter if we think we're here to pin the caterpillar. We won't do it, regardless of what we think we can do. This isn't nihilistic, or "anti-art"; it actually frees us artists to explore. Now, as to what it is we're exploring...we could begin that conversation once we establish that we can't establish anything concrete, at least not yet...