Two words you seldom have seen together, ‘thrill’ and ‘phenomenology’. Perhaps the later word you’ve never seen at all. We will begin there.
Phenomenology is a philosophical word. It begins with things as they are – – – wait for it – – – things as they are – – – experienced. Most philosophies begin with an idea that is developed into a system. Phenomenologists, don’t do that. They begin with the ‘thing-as-it-appears.’ Not things as they are defined and cataloged but as they are experienced.
For instance, water is chemically defined as H2O. But we do not experience hydrogen and oxygen, we experience wetness, movement or stillness, hot or cold, too little (drought) or too much (flood). The word phenomenon comes from the Greek ‘phainein’ meaning ‘to appear.’ Phenomenology is the study of things as they appear in our experience. Through the lens of phenomenology we do not see the abstract, we see the concrete, not the ideal but the actual.
Phenomenology is attention lavished on the richness of experience.
Poets are by nature phenomenologists, not entirely, but mostly. They pay attention to the world appearing to them not as idea but as experience. They are present to an immediate and intimate contact with the world. The poem is an attempt to deliver that intimate and immediate experience in the form of language. T. S. Eliot in his famous poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ does not tell us about loneliness and alienation in London in the first years of the 20th century. Eliot makes us feel that despair through the scenes he paints and the words he chooses to paint them. Unlike a restaurant menu which describes the food, Eliot’s poem lets us taste the banquet of estrangement and desperation.
Writing a poem is a word process using words to get abstraction out of the way so we can feel the thrill of raw experience.