On Poetry
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Happy World Poetry Day! Here’s your regular reminder that reading or writing poetry is not a luxury and you should love yourself and wrap yourself in poems every day. If you don’t believe me, read on to hear it directly from Li-Young Lee, Ada Limon, Joy Harjo, Anne Boyer, and folks more intimately associated with poetry than I am. At the end of this newsletter, you can find some poem-a-day resources to get you started!
“What poetry has taught me is that if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to cry for it the other trees will learn how to. In the wake of another splintering they will say, I see you. I too am growing sideways.”
— Ashe Vernon, from POETRY AS COMMUNITY
“You hear this all the time, but it’s the most important advice you can give anyone: read as much as you can. Read novels, essays, the news, books on architecture, cultural criticism. Read, read, read. You’ll learn everything from reading. Inform yourself about the world and history. Get a library card and devour the books; read as much poetry as possible. Old poets, young poets, dead poets, contemporary poets, poets from other countries, poets in translation. Do not be afraid to dig deep for the roots of your own culture. Notice the world: the luminous spider web in the garden, the big sculpture mottled by pigeon shit. Your images are there, at hand, in the world. And don’t be afraid of the page. Respect it, but don’t be scared of it.”
— Aria Aber, interviewed by Meher Manda for the Atticus Review
“I imagine poets stitching the world together. Long silver threads of text. Lines prompting reading, dreaming minds not to see every thing by itself and separate, but to see the seams often unseen in the dark expanses across space and time. This is, perhaps, a kind of sorcery. A power not to wield, but to hold. To practice holding.”
— Ellie A. Rogers, from “Movements,” Ecotone: Reimagining Place
“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”
— Joy Harjo
“People who think poetry has no power have very limited conception of what power means. Even now, in this corporate country, where presidents do not call up poets on the telephone, some little lyric is eating into the fat heart of money. And even now some portion of Osip Mandelstam’s quicksilver spirit gleams and lives in the lines he left behind:
“You have stolen my ocean, my swiftness, my soar, Delivered me to the clutch of uprupturing earth, And for what? The mouth still moves though the man cannot.”
— Christian Wiman, from God Is Not Beyond
“I’ve always believed that poetry exists in part to reveal the soul’s capacity for compassion, sacrifice, and endurance. For some of us, this satisfies a basic human need, like air or water, but a poem must also have music, imagery, and form. Because there is a kind of nakedness or authenticity in poetry that is associated with truth, on many days I haven’t the guts for it, and I fail. But when I succeed, there is nothing in life—except love—that equally verifies my existence.”
— Henri Cole, from Orphic Paris
“[P]oetry holds — it’s like a — you can hold what can’t be said. It can’t be paraphrased. It can’t be translated. The great poetry I love holds the mystery of on being alive. It holds it in a kind of basket of words that feels inevitable. There’s great, great, great prose, gorgeous prose. You and I could probably quote some right now. Poetry has a kind of trancelike quality still. It has the quality of a spell still.”
— Marie Howe, from On Being
“I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky. Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing. Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.”
— Ada Limón interviewed by Lauren LeBlanc, BOMB Magazine
“Poetry is sometimes a no. Its relative silence is the negative’s underhanded form of singing. Its flights into a range-y interior are, in the world of fervid external motion, sometimes a method of standing still. Poetry is semi-popular with teenagers and revolutionaries and good at going against, saying whatever is the opposite of whatever, providing nonsense for sense and sense despite the world’s alarming nonsense.”
— Anne Boyer, from No
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough it say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
— Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.”
— Li-Young Lee, interviewed by Matthew Fluharty for The Missouri Review
“It must be in part the wordlessness of creatures. Our speech rushes in where there are no words, and in the process we understand that our acts of description are both bridges to animal life and evidence of our distance from them. The very tool we reach for to approach them holds us at bay […] When our imaginations meet a mind decidedly not like ours, our own nature is suddenly called into question. We place our own eye beside that of the fish in order to question our own seeing. Consciousness can’t be taken for granted when there are, plainly, varieties of awareness. The result is an intoxicating uncertainty. And that is a relief, is it not, to acknowledge that we do not after all know what a self is? A corrective to human arrogance, to the numbing certainty that puts a soul to sleep. It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak and to speak, to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is. Perhaps the dream of lyric poetry is not just to represent states of mind, but to actually provoke them in the reader.”
— Mark Doty, The Art of Description; “A Tremendous Fish”
Poem a day/week resources: