- Jul 30, 2023
Updated: Jul 31, 2023
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- Jul 30, 2023
Updated: Aug 1, 2023
In 2017 I was privileged to publish a book of poems, The Frozen Harbor, with the Minnesota
publisher Red Dragonfly Press. Scott King, Red Dragonfly’s editor and publisher, was a great
pleasure to work with. A husband, father, translator, book designer, poet, artist, carpenter,
engineer, essayist, naturalist and dragonfly expert, he and I became friends, regularly emailing letters back and forth, exchanging our writings and books. When Scott died suddenly in 2021 at the age of 56, I was shocked, of course, and deeply saddened. A year or so later, curious to find out how the press was faring, I sent an email to Leslie Taylor, who had stepped in as a volunteer to help organize Red Dragonfly’s publishing commitments in Scott’s absence. She told me that the last book Scott had edited and designed before his passing was Joe Paddock’s Infinity’s Edge: Jung, Tao, and the Poet’s Way. As a kind of homage to Scott’s life and spirit, I read the book right away. I was powerfully impressed: the book is a beauty—vividly written, accessible, and full of fresh, engaging insights. Through Leslie, I got Joe’s email address and asked him if he’d be interested in being interviewed for Hole in the Head. I’m really grateful to Joe for the honesty and thoroughness of his answers to my questions and for his willingness to dig deep in both these responses and in Infinity’s Edge itself.
MH: Toward the beginning of your book—in fact in the first chapter—we encounter these words: “There are…great advantages in our becoming consciously aware of and involved
with our dream content when we wake, experiencing it as we do, say, an obscure poem, and coming to terms with it in much the same way as we do that poem.” This is very interesting on many levels. Could you please elaborate, particularly the ways in which “reading” a dream might be similar to responding to an obscure poem—or any poem, for that matter.
JP: In both dream and obscure poem interpretation has to do with coming to terms with metaphoric images and situations, with little or no help from linear language. Our feeling response to the image or situation should prove a guide for us. As for dream, the great depth psychologist Carl Jung (my companion throughout this book) has written that the metaphoric language of the unconscious is the one foreign language that we should all come to know. I should note here that, though I might loosely be called a Jungian, I am by no means a complete Jung scholar. Jung opened the door to the unconscious for me, but it is what has flowed through it that has guided me along my way. In good part Infinity’s Edge tells of that story.
A principal difference between poem and dream is that in the dream the metaphors contain a message meant specifically for the dreamer. If in the dream, you find yourself on thin ice, it would be good to discover what that means in terms of your life situation.
As an example I’ll offer here an important dream for me which helped me to an understanding of the bardic mission that is an ongoing element in this book. In the dream I am on the bank of my local river, the Crow, at the place where the mill wheel turned at the beginning of white settlement here in my home region. In dream and vision water is the most common metaphor for the unconscious realm, the creative source, and a striking woman, an archetypal anima or muse, stands before me then sinks into the river water in a swirl of clothing. In a few moments she returns holding out for me a manuscript that glows. Then a bit downstream I am somehow sitting at the center of a massive keyboard that stretches completely across the river. It seems I might be allowed to learn how to play it.
In response to a later dream, I wrote a poem titled “Bard of the Crow” in which I, with a necessary touch of humor, but with seriousness too, claim that role. This bard, as the unconscious has described it for me, is a poet who serves, like a tribal storyteller, as a provider of images and stories for a place and its people. The poem ends with these lines:
....A harvest then, a gathering
of stories and whatever wisdom is
caught within them, accumulated
from life to life, mostly forgotten.
And surely this is mission enough. Yes,
I hear the happy honking of the geese,
and in last night’s dream, the goddess-muse
wrote it all down, and then to make sure,
spoke it out loud:
“I need,” she said,
with calm intensity,
“the echoes of the ancestors
to reverberate in me.”
MH: The connections between the process of exploring poetry and Jung’s thinking are fairly clear to most serious writers and readers of poetry, as are the connections between poetry and Tao. However, the linking of the Tao and Jung have a certain suggestive resonance and surprise that feels new and very interesting to me. I think of those two approaches to self and being as very different in terms of their relationship with mind and outer world. Can you talk a bit about how poetry brings them together, if indeed it does?
JP: There isn’t the distance between Jung and the Tao that likely exists in the minds of most poets. In psychiatrist David Rosen’s The Tao of Jung. we find this quote from Jung: “The truth is everywhere the same, and the Tao is a quite perfect expression of it.” Jung also wrote that: “The human psyche is the womb of . . . all art.” Emergent from it then. Surely a parallel there with the emptiness of the Tao being the open source, the emptiness out from which all of creation flows. Here though we are talking about the unconscious, the psyche below the conscious ego level, as the source from which creative content flows. The poet and the poem of course have a foot in both worlds. One could compare the poet to a downstream paddler in a canoe, guiding a bit as necessary, but once the creative flow starts, the paddler-poet should be careful to not get in its way, but flow on and with it.
MH: How are poetry and synchronicity linked? Does it have to do with what you call an individual’s emotional recognition of meaningful connections. That is, does poetry provide the necessary emotional recognition of synchronistic connections occurring more often than we realize? If so, how does it accomplish this goal?
JP: Since the concept may not be familiar to every reader, I will say here that synchronicity is the simultaneous occurrence of events which have no discernible causal connection but which feel significantly related. Its our emotional response to the event that awakens us to the synchronicity.
As I see it, it is less that the poem provides the necessary emotion to awaken us to the synchronous event than that the emotion inherent in the experience of the event that leads to the poem. However, it surely works in both directions. In the book I’ve told of a number of such incidents in my life, and I’ve included Thomas R. Smith’s poem “Often it’s a Bird” in which he tells of a man who when digging to bury his wife’s urn a chickadee came to rest on his pick handle. The man was moved by this surprising visit. And wasn’t somehow his wife contained within the tiny presence that had come to rest so near him? And then in the poem, a week after the death of his father, Smith tells of a moment on the golf course when his brother who often golfed with their father watched as a crow strutted across the green and tipped the ball into the hole with its beak. I’m guessing that the brother must have said, “Thanks dad.”
On a less obvious level, I believe that whatever emotional response awakens a poet to write has connections in the mind and life of the poet that are synchronous. Vague synchronous connections are ongoing gifts that Life provides us all and perhaps especially the poet who is alive to his or her moments. Of course neither the poet nor the listener or reader of the poem are thinking, ah, synchronicity!
MH: One of your chapters is titled “The Ecology of Creativity,” which I find to be a wonderfully evocative and intriguing phrase—very useful too. I’d like to hear more about your own ecology of creativity.
JP: The unconscious is nature within us, and the processes of the creative unconscious are one with those in the creative evolution of nature. They contain just that same vitality and evolutionary drive toward balance, homeostasis, health, climax perfection.... Writing is fun and exciting when it goes with this flow.
In my understanding of the ecology of creativity, it’s not good to be too conscious during especially the beginning of a creative process such as the writing of a poem. In it we merge, and its better to allow the ongoing flow to work through one. A most important magic!
A poem is far less something that we make, as if laying bricks, than something that emerges from the unconscious mind and happens through us. Works of art then can be thought of as products of nature, like dreams, flowers, children.... Still, in the end, except in a fully given poem, the poet returns to the conscious mind and guides it to its final form. The poet and the poem then have a foot in both worlds.
As I tell of in the book, I spent much of the six ear period between 1968 and 1974 living in an unimproved wilderness cabin on Minnesota’s wild Kettle River. During that time I became especially alive to the ongoing flow, the interchange that is ever going on in the natural world. In a poem written at that time, I included these lines:
Everything eating everything else,
nature flows
through the gut of itself.
MH: Briefly elaborate on what you mean by a “given” poem. I wonder how a “given” poem differs from the first drafts of most poems, since (at least for me) most poems are “discovered” in their making.
JP: A given poem as Ive experienced it happens largely of itself on its own energy, flowing from the unconscious as with a dream. Taoism has much to do with the way I live, think and write, and I frequently turn to Lao Tzu for a bit of respite. Nature does abhor a vacuum, and the emptied and open mind of Tao now and again allows a poem to open out and flow, finding its way, like water giving in to the gravitational forces that lead it along. The result will be not overly worked, overly tight. The Taoist approach admires the effortless––what just happens of itself–– dislikes what seems too worked. The given poem then is a product of the unconscious, of nature, and should have the spiritual validity of a dream. Which the overly worked poem may not.
MH: Though you don’t much discuss the ideas of Jung’s mentor Freud in Infinity’s Edge, these have obviously been tremendously influential on 20th century poetry and poetics. I wonder what you think of Freud’s influence on literature, and art in general.
JP: I’ll have to be careful here. Most of my understanding of Sigmund Freud has to do with what’s been reflected from my engagement with Jung. Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that Freud was a major influence on 20th century poetry and art in general. The Surrealist art movement, with its focus on dreams, was directly influenced by Freud. Surrealist poetry allowed the liberated subconscious mind to find its way in a dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness writing style. Shades of the “given poem” in this, and I think too of a writing exercise I and other poets I’ve known have given to students in which it is suggested that they write whatever comes to mind whether or not it makes conscious sense. The hope is that something interesting and of value will emerge.
I think that the main difference between Freud and Jung when it comes to understanding the psyche is that for Jung the collective unconscious is made up of Inherited archetypal content. Just as we’ve inherited the evolving physical characteristics of the life that has preceded us, so too have we inherited the wisdom guidance that is given in archetypal dream and vision content. If I’ve got it right, for Freud the subconscious and the dreams that rise from it are an outcome of repression, of repressed childhood memories and sexually related repression. For Jung, if the metaphoric language of them is understood, dreams are given guides, laden with inherited wisdom, that tell the truth about our lives.
MH: How would you define “organic form” in poetry? Would you find more meaning in the kind of organic form Robert Creeley is thinking about when he says that “form and content are one,” or perhaps in the sense of “organic” as being of the earth, grounded in earth and concrete images. What is the “bardic” role of the poet?
JP: Both the Creeley idea and organic form in the sense of ‘‘organic as being of the earth” work well for me. I think here of the fully integrated working together of the organs of a living body. The deep autonomic self in us, our breathing, our heartbeat, the lymphatic flow work harmoniously within without mind intrusion. As does the integrated ecosystem when not overly disturbed by us. And so then does the poem find its form organically when mostly allowed to become itself. I think also here of Jung’s thought that “The human psyche is the womb of . . . all art.” As he sees it then, art including poetry is born from the psyche, surely inheriting from it then the form of its parenting source, and as with a living organism its parts work in an integrated way.
I’ll mention here too, as I’ve written in the book, that I believe the deep underlying theme of our poetry has to do with our ego isolation from the whole of things. Whether conscious of it or not, the poet and the poem open us out to a oneness with that whole. As Wordsworth has told us we come “trailing clouds of glory.”
At the end of the above question, you add a second question: What is the “bardic” role of the poet? Guidance given me from the unconscious tells that the bard, beyond simply being a good enough poet or storyteller, has to become a voice for a place and its people and their story, the story which that people inhabits. As I’ve mentioned probably more than once in the book, storied place becomes sacred place for those who inhabit it.
Inner life guidance by way of dreams and other psychic phenomena--this has much to do with what my book is about--has led me to and to write of the story and place of my origins, a region, mostly rural and small town. Of course there are bards in this sense of given cities, neighborhoods, athletic fields, perhaps ethnic origins.... One could say the bard writes of, to, and for what he or she is rooted in, his or her gift back to the whole within which he has risen and existed. This in part has to do with what is synchronistically given to him or her along the way.
MH: Do you have a writing practice? A meditation practice? If so, what are they? If not, why not?
JP: My poet wife of 48 years, Nancy Paddock, is now in memory care. I visit her almost every afternoon and re-introduce myself to her. She’s only three blocks from my doorstep, but so very far gone. So in this my late-life situation I spend much time alone. I mostly write in the mornings, and have been working on a volume of new and selected poems. I meditate now and again at any time during the day. Sometimes with a mantra, sometimes simply paying attention to my breathing, sometimes closing my eyes and going lost in image flow. It is often imagery of water, still or flowing, that emerges.
In the prologue to Infinity’s Edge, I wrote about a long ago sturdy oak rocker that I spent much time in that I thought of as my thinking chair. Now my chairs are more often devoted to “no thought.” The Zen concept of “no mind” fits here, the mind of no mind, free of thought or anxiety, simply alive then in the present moment. Quite nice when it’s working well.
MH: Which postmodern/contemporary poets have been most important to you? And which poets/writers of the more distant as well as the truly distant past?
JP: My literary connections may be quite a bit more limited than with most of the poets you interview. In college I found Chaucer quite to my liking. In my later career, as I turned more fully to poetry, Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry were very important to me. As an environmental activist working with projects such as The American Farm Project and the Land Stewardship Project which I helped to start, the books of these two were always nearby me, and on a couple occasions I was programmed with Berry. I remember a long ago refusal from the editor of a literary journal that mentioned I sounded too much like Gary Snyder.
Other poets more or less contemporary with me that I’ve found important include Thomas McGrath, William Stafford, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, Joyce Sutphen, and Ted Kooser. My age is showing here. So many of these have passed on now. But their poetry does live on.
I must not forget here my wife, Nancy Paddock, a truly fine poet. We worked together for years through an array of arts and environmental projects. I’ve mentioned her current circumstances, and as her dementia worsened, she drifted away from the poetry she’d been working with. It was moving and deeply satisfying for me to go into her computer and gather together the poems of her final book, Green Reaching, published by Red Dragonfly Press.
MH: Where is the true source, within or without? What do the wild ones think when they see us?
JP: The true source. within or without? I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide the final answer to this. Anyway, as I see it, the consciousness of the isolate ego self is divided from the source, the whole of things. But, the unconscious Self within is ever reaching across to us by way of dreams, visions, creative imaginings and creative illnesses. These coming from the greater realm within expand to include the whole of things. As ego self consciousness the true source within increasingly flows out in oneness with the whole of things.
I’ll add here that I’ve written in the book that I’ve come to believe that our isolation from the whole of things is the principal underlying theme of our poetry. And in poems the poet at his or her best can bring us to moments when small self goes lost in the realm of the infinite.
And then there is the Tao. Quoting myself here, “Lao Tzu wrote that one should ‘Enter into Tao as if you are leaving it.’ Give up intention and will and allow the mind to go empty, go lost, and then you will be near, hovering there on infinity’s edge. And the poet, with a foot in both worlds, has work to do.”
As for, “what do the wild ones think when they see us?” Life is programmed for survival. The bird instinctually recognizes the squirrel as not so dangerous, unlike the lurking cat. We are more like the cat for them, but when we feed the birds this relaxes. This not only with birds. I have a friend who pours a bag of corn onto the ground near the fire ring in his extensive sculpture garden, then rings a little bell. He then sits down on a nearby bench, and after a bit deer slowly begin to emerge from the surrounding cover, and he, with sometimes a friend beside him, sits just a few feet from the deer as they feed.
MH: How would you define “sacred,” and how does poetry fit into that dimension?
JP: What is sacred is ever present within and around us. The busyness of our lives, the “getting and spending,” divide us from it. A sense of the sacred wakens in us when we open our minds to the strange fact of our existence, of life, that there is anything at all! What is sacred is ever with us. We need only open our eyes, our selves, to the presence of it.
In Infinity’s Edge I argue that storied place is sacred place. This especially for those somehow involved with that story. Shared story that ties the group or community together in memory opens the psyche to a living sense of the sacred, whether we think of or use that word or not.
And of course sacred moments, sacred places are brought to life in poetry. I’ve written a short poem, which I”ll share here, in which the poem itself is recognized as a sacred place:
THE SANCTUARY
When we write poems, free
of excessive self, we create
for ourselves and others
who enter a sacred place
of words, windows stained
by the blood of our lives
that allow in the radiance.
This place exists outside time
for the time we are in it.
It is a sanctuary
in which our burdens go lost
in the white spaces
between the lines.
Within the resonance
of its interior,
we often discover,
however briefly, even in
times such as these, happiness.
MH: Could you discuss what Jung meant by a “personal myth”?
JP: Jung believed that like dreams myths express wisdom that has been encoded in all humans, and our ongoing and evolving personal story, if well tended, will evolve to become our personal myth, the conveyer of wisdom and meaning in our life. The final chapter of Infinity’s Edge, “A Long-lived Fellowship of Writers,” tells of the local writers group I mentored for 30 years till caring for my wife caused me to back away. My intention during those years was less to lead the group toward publishing success than to lead the writers to discover, hone and develop their personal story. Till it, yes, would become mythic for them. One of the group members, pharmacist and fine writer Bill Peletier, in his writing now and again celebrated his home corner here in Litchfield as Greater Peletonia, the flags of which were waved by a dozen or so members of his family as they marched away at the end of his recent funeral.
MH: Turning to Freud for a moment, toward the beginning of your book, you share one of your own poems as illustration of Freud’s ideas. The poem, “So Strange,” is short enough to be quoted in its entirety: “We travel timidly,/fearfully/in the small boats/of ourselves./So strange/when we are also/the water.” Would you please talk about how this poem relates to and is illustrative of Freud’s ideas? And Jung’s?
JP: Freud, like Jung, was quite aware that ego consciousness, our consciousness in a given moment, is but a frail craft on the ocean of subconsciousness (Freud), the unconscious (Jung). For Jung the unconscious holds controlling and guiding archetypes, inherited just as we inherit our physical characteristics. For Freud, as I mentioned before, the subconscious is made up of repressed experience from childhood and of sexual repression. Truly popular with the artists and writers of his time, Freud’s theories of the subconscious led to Surrealism, a movement which sought freedom from the constraints of the rational mind and societal constraints that artists and writers found oppressive. In any case, both Freud and Jung were fully aware of the infinite ocean that underlies our conscious moments.
MH: I’m curious to hear you discuss your wonderful and evocative term “shaman’s sickness.” What is shamanic sickness?
JP: Here in Minnesota there are a goodly number of Hmong refugees from the Viet Nam war among whom there is a shamanic tradition. On a recent Minnesota Public Radio interview, I listened to a Hmong shaman reiterating that “There is so much sickness, so much sickness.”
Both Freud and Jung suffered midlife sickness that went on for years, out from which came much of what they would later offer to the world. Jung wrote of his long and difficult experience in his Red Book about which he has said that the illness-driven fantasies and dreams of that period were the source of all his later works and creative activity resulting in the formulation of his analytical psychology.
In the chapter in Infinity’s Edge titled “Sickness is the Healer,” I tell of my own experience with shamanic sickness or guiding illness. As with dreams, visions and synchronicities, this sickness is emergent guidance in certain individuals, forcing them to give in and accept a role different from their early ego imaginings and ambitions. I am not a shaman and for me the role I was not so gently led into, helped along by synchronistic opportunities, was that of a certain type of poet, best described as a bardic poet-activist, a voice for people and place. In his essay “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” Jung wrote, fittingly to my circumstances, that “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.”
In Infinity’s Edge, I wrote that my personal myth fits with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, one element of which has to do with “refusal of the summons,” which leads to the shamanic or guiding illness I’ve been discussing here.
MH: And please do the same with your equally evocative term (used in the poem “May Day Awakening”), “Liminal Mind.”
JP: For me “liminal mind” has long referred to that blurry space between sleep and waking during which, though no longer in dream, something dreamlike is given. In the case of the poem you mention, the words “not reason but song” sounded in mind for me. Such emergent content could be a remnant of a dream or something new given for one’s entry into daylight. Too easily lost in the first moments of waking.
I’ll mention here that “Not Reason but Song” is the title of the chapbook I’ll be sending to you and Bill along with my responses to these questions.
MH: “We inhabit story at least as fully and deeply as we do place.” Very interesting. Tell us more.
JP: It would be good here to think on the necessity of a background in a work of fiction. The background, the place in which the narrative is happening, will inevitably emerge with the telling of the story. Life doesn’t happen in a vacuum, nor do stories. Whatever our place, whatever our community or communities, we are contained by the personal and shared memories contained within them, their stories.
This ties in to Jung’s thinking on personal myth. The happenings we experience and those we inherit from storytellers become touchstones and psychological containers for our lives. Without story, related remembrance, place is psychologically empty. We live within memories of the family we grew up in, the schools we attended, the people we’ve admired, loved or hated. Good times and bad, laden with the emotions of the happenings. What would we be without such memories? They are the containers of our lives.
Without competition from television and such, Native American storytellers once created tribal togetherness through the stories they told about their past. And for them, their storied place was their holy land. And yes, storied place does have a way of becoming sacred place.
There is a late chapter in Infinity’s Edge titled “Oral Historian,” and this discussion of a place and its story--the subtitle of a 300 page book of poetry of mine--provides a place to mention the importance of oral history in my writing. Projects I’ve worked in and with have led me to become an oral historian, and in my writing, recorded storytelling has often flowed out into narrative poetry, story poems, perhaps originally intended for the community of the interviewee, but often reaching beyond.
MH: Finally, at the heart of your book you use the term “land organism” and go on to say the following: “’land organism’ has been a principal underlying metaphor in much of my writing. It’s a phrase expressive of the fully interconnected ecosystem…” This is beautiful and deeply resonant. Again, I’d like to hear more.
JP: The land organism: Though I only occasionally use the phrase directly in my writing, an awareness of it is an ongoing living part of my consciousness. It has to do with the interconnectedness within the whole of the natural world, including us. Just as a living individual, animal or human animal, contains its various organs--gut, heart, liver and the many more--all in ongoing harmonious interaction without guidance from the mind, in an expanded sense we too are an “organ” within the interactions of the greater organism, ”the land organism.” Our unconscious mind is nature within us, at one with that greater flow, but our ego consciousness, ever seeking advantage, is almost by definition divided from it, and with ever greater technological power, it is increasingly disrupting the flow of healthy interchange.
The land organism is of course fighting back in expanding ways. I’ve called this “the big story,” and its plot is beginning to move now at a truly rattling pace. Populations are expanding and things are heating up. Our oceans are turning acid and our rainforests are diminishing, this all part of the ongoing interconnected flow of the planetary land organism. May we come to more fully understand and adapt to its necessities.
Joe Paddock is a poet, oral historian, and environmental writer whose adult life has been a spiralic odyssey homeward toward Self and rootedness in place. Buoyed along by guidance from the “vast and deep waters of the unconscious,” often working with his poet and author wife, Nancy Paddock, there were fascinating, if sometimes painful, “island stops” along the way. These included spending much of the six year period between 1968 and 1974 living in an unimproved cabin on Minnesota’s wild Kettle River, National Endowment for the Arts residencies as a community and regional poet in Southwest Minnesota, as a poet-in-residence for Minnesota Public Radio at Worthington, as a humanist with the American Farm Project, and a consultant with the Minnesota Rural Arts Initiative. He was a writer-in-residence at Lakewood Community College and an adjunct faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the University of Minnesota. A founding member of the Land Stewardship Project, he is the principal author of the Sierra Club book Soil and Survival. In addition, he is the author of Keeper of the Wild, the biography of wilderness preservationist Ernest Oberholtzer. His books of poetry include Circle of Stones, Dark Dreaming, Global Dimming, and A Sort of Honey (Red Dragonfly Press); Boars’ Dance (Holy Cow! Press); Earth Tongues (Milkweed Editions); and Handful of Thunder (Anvil Press). Beyond books of his own he has been involved on one level or another with a great many project books, and both his poetry and prose has appeared in many journals. For his poetry Paddock has received the Lakes and Prairies Award of Milkweed Editions and the Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction. For work in support of the arts in Southwest Minnesota, he was a recipient of the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council’s Prairie Disciple Award. He now lives in the house in which he grew up in Litchfield, Minnesota.
- Jul 26, 2023
EDITOR'S NOTE: Bob Herz–poet, editor, man-of-letters– died on May 28, 2023 at age 74. Bob was publisher and editor, with his colleagues Steve Kuusisto and Andrea Scarpino, of the Nine Mile Magazine and Book Series.
Bob wrote poems and, perhaps as importantly, thought and wrote about poets, poetry, and the creative process. He was a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and published three books of his own poetry, three books of translations, and a book of essays.
Bob was an early and constant supporter of and contributor to Hole In The Head.
A Role for Poets: historian of the present
By Bob Herz
What is a useful role for a poet writing in times like these, amid the realities of what feels like permanent war, endless pandemic, a soft and somehow never-quite recovering economy, tainted social and political and governmental structures, and widespread public and personal disaffection?
These are things we note implicitly or explicitly in our art as we engage the world. They don’t make our art, of course, but they are part of the environment in which we work. We include or exclude them, but one way or the other we engage them or are engaged by them. We have no choice. They are inescapable, the air we breathe, the life we live.
I should add that when I say “useful,” I mean the word in its broadest humanist sense, a meaning to be applied in public as well as private spheres. We know that art can accurately and importantly describe or challenge the world, or act as a parallel creation, that it can always remind us of our vast human possibilities and our definite responsibilities, can always call us to be more human. That is part of its virtue. Every time we create, all the possibilities are in front of us as we write, even as we erase—all the good, all the evil, all the choices between. It’s one reason why creating gives us the opportunity to become better people. We see in those times life in its possibilities and promises and incredible beauty.
Beauty is one way in which art does this, calls up all these possibilities, makes them available. Aesthetic accuracy is another help in developing this essentiality. And here’s another word, though it may seem an odd one, for our list: effectiveness. Some things are beautiful and accurate but they do not move us; so we can say that they are not effective.
Anyway, without putting up an entire essay on the usefulness of art (it would be a very long essay), I’d like to suggest that one useful role for a poet might be as an historian of the present.
This is an idea I’ve had for awhile, and I come to it by an odd route. I’ve been thinking about political poetry, or better said, politically involved poetry. Of the good poetry written with political or polemical intent, it seems to me that in general the strongest poems are those that take cognizance of the total life of their times, or at least the large share of it that affects the moment, and that thus operate beyond the instant event or judgment. Those are poems that capture the ambiguity and variety of complex considerations that are always a part of any human activity and thought. Nothing needs be consistent in this effort. In the real world we always operate with our contradictions intact.
So to offer my thesis more simply: Poems become more powerful and effective as they honestly confront the times, and even, as necessary, confront their authors. By including those difficulties and complexities, the authors become historians of the present. They write the history of today, of life as actually lived and as we make our commitments. To be honest about it is to confront the messiness of the commitment process, and even the messiness that lingers after the commitment is made. I believe that this is critical, if we are to have poems that can speak effectively to issues such as politics, or the forever, “hidden” wars, or the climate, and so many other themes that make up the mosaic of things that affect and afflict our culture.
We can start, perhaps, by looking backward for examples. W.B. Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” is a poem that undertakes this kind of confrontation brilliantly. Robert Bly’s “Sleet Storm on the Merritt Parkway” is another. There are several by Rexroth that impress me in exactly this way, and I describe and quote some more recent poems below, Elena Karina Byrne’s “During the Vietnam War,” and Kathleen Ossip’s “Goddess.” I don’t suggest that these are greater poems than others written by these poets, only that they bring a power and richness to the work and an effectiveness that their other poems lack, because of how they are involved in the world. Here is the Yeats poem:
Easter 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Notice how Yeats frames the poem, starting with an uncomplimentary portrait of himself as a clubby snob patronizing the people who will be heroes of the Easter uprisings. They are shopkeepers, office workers, merchants, who now occupy the “gray / Eighteenth-century houses,” those rows of connected and identical multi-story brick homes of 1916 Dublin with its Georgian squares and terraces; Yeats, the faux-aristocrat lived in one such house, at 82 Merrion Square. These people the meets in the street are, he believes, beneath him: They are office-workers or shop-keepers, bureaucrats and petite-bourgeoise. He speaks meaninglessly with them only long enough to get mocking or witty stories that he can trade later over drinks around the fire at his club. He tells us that he has always assumed that they are all nobodies, fools who wear motley, rank members of life’s casual comedy.
In the second stanza he enumerates but does not name the key players involved in the Easter uprisings, though he will do so later. Here he seeks to preserve them as archetypes, roles he can describe and classify. He knows them all, and gives us a taxonomy of the revolution: the shrill woman, the two poets, the drunk. The woman is never named in the poem, but is the nationalist politician Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz. The rest of the actors are named later. The man is the poet Patrick Pearse, a leader of the uprising, and his helper is the poet Thomas MacDonagh. The last named is the “drunken, vainglorious lout,” John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s abusive former husband, a man Yeats intensely disliked, in no small part perhaps because of his own long amorous and frustrated involvement with her.
The Easter rising was an armed rebellion or rising that took place throughout Ireland on April 24, 1916. The effort sought to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish republic by taking over key places. In Dublin, the rising involved about 1,200 people in the city center, with a command post at the Post Office. None of the leaders seems to have had much military sense. They did not know how to press their advantages when they had them. The rising lasted six days and was then put down by the British, who arrested nearly 3,500 people as rebels, though many were subsequently released. About 1,500 people were sent to England for trial and internment, most released later under an amnesty. The men named in the poem and many other leaders were all executed in the first weeks of May.
The death-sentence of Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz, the woman not mentioned in the poem, was commuted to life in prison. Sometime later she was released in the general amnesty, and later elected to Parliament, becoming one of the few female cabinet ministers ever in England or Europe. She never lost her revolutionary zeal, and her continuing fights for Irish independence meant that she spent some additional time in jail.
All these people are mythologized, though still not named, in the next stanza, where Yeats describes their hearts as unchanging stone against the natural change of nature. Their hearts “trouble” the living stream. They are out of nature, their passion an inanimate troubling thing.
It is a harsh judgment, one of many made about them and their followers in the poem. In the first stanza, Yeats presented them as fools and nobodies, and as we learn here, they are fanatics, their emotional or psychological selves unnatural, out of life as it really is, and troubling the natural rhythm or order. In this next stanza he questions whether the sacrifice made by these fools and fanatics was worth it: “O when may it suffice?” he asks, and then: “Was it needless death after all?” and then finally, “What if excess of love / Bewildered them until they died?” After all, “England may keep faith / For all that is done and said.” Their love for country bewildered them, and made them do what the poem regards as an unnecessary and foolish thing. Yeats knew them all and had found them mildly good fodder for a laugh around the fire at his club. But now, with this event, all is changed; their lives and causes, whatever they might have been, have been transfigured, and made beautiful in a terrible way, by their deaths. “We know their dream,” he says, “enough / To know they dreamed and are dead.”
This is all quite messy. Yeats has made harsh judgments on himself, and harsh judgments on the conspirators, and on their crusade, and then, in a terrible moment, they become heroes, to be remembered wherever green is worn, “now and in time to be.” This is an extraordinary claim of transfiguration. The Easter title of the poem and of the event gives more depth to the act: Christians believe that at Easter the Christ who was dead rose from that death and redeemed the world. Here, conspirators who were alive but insignificant went to their deaths in a flawed and, Yeats suggests, a perhaps unnecessary act, and by it became heroes to be celebrated for all time.
Messy, as I say; but phenomenally powerful.
I leave aside the technical aspects of the poem, the extraordinary and almost magical use of trimeter, which is usually best for lighthearted verse, and the poetic numerology (16 lines in the first and third stanzas, for 1916, and 24 lines in the second and fourth, for April 24, the date the uprising began, and four stanzas, for the fourth month). I believe that what gives the poem its power is the honesty with which Yeats deals with the event, with his own feelings about it, and his own questions. Compare, in this light, a one-dimensional poem like Shelley’s “England in 1819”:
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
We get the rage, of course. But lacking ambiguity, questioning of events, or any self-doubt, the poem is pure polemic, having the power of a polemic, but not much more. It seems tethered to its moment, and cannot rise above its rhetoric. One could call Shelley an historian of the present—the poem after all is dated and means to be paradigmatic for the politics of the year—but if so, at least for our purposes, he is a poor one, leaving out too much of life, and miring the poem in its moment, like, to borrow a Yeatsian figure, a fly in amber. The Yeats poem, by contrast, gains its power from its self-doubt, even from its indecision, and certainly from its honesty. It is effective in a way that the Shelley cannot be because it lacks the comprehensiveness and openness to present experience of the Yeats poem.
There are exceptions to the point I am making here about breadth and effectiveness, and we should note them: a one-dimensional poem like “Counting Small Boned Bodies” is incredibly effective, achieving its effect by compression of the world to a desktop and the exclusion of everything except the madness of the speaker:
Let’s count the bodies over again.
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
A year’s kill in front of us on a desk!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keepsake forever.
The poem makes its point by enacting its hysteria and touching those areas of moral judgment capable of shock; but the poem’s scope is limited due to its method of radical selection, excluding everything but the inhumane. There is no motion in the poem, no resolution, because the speaker’s condition has made resolution impossible.
We can look at two more poems, to sharpen our sense of the kinds of discriminations I am trying to outline here. One is also by Robert Bly and one by Kenneth Rexroth. Robert Bly’s poem is, I think, one of his best, as it presents all the furniture of the present, the condition of passengers driving to a big city in a near-dangerous sleet storm; importantly, it doesn’t try to make its case merely by asserting judgments against other people, even those with whom the poet disagrees. There are judgments, of course, but when they come—“the children end in the river of price-fixing / Or in the snowy field of the insane asylum”—they are doubly effective because we feel that Bly has been fair in his assessment up to that point in the poem, and then we find that he is fair to his companions, who argued with him about so many others things the night before, but “no one agreed”:
Sleet Storm on the Merritt Parkway
I look out at the white sleet covering the still streets
As we drive through Scarsdale—
The sleet began falling as we left Connecticut,
And the winter leaves swirled in the wet air after cars
Like hands suddenly turned over in a conversation.
Now the frost has nearly buried the short grass of March.
Seeing the sheets of sleet untouched on the wide streets,
I think of the many comfortable homes stretching for miles,
Two and three stories, solid, with polished floors,
With white curtains in the upstairs bedrooms,
And small perfume flagons of black glass on the windowsills,
And warm bathrooms with guest towels, and electric lights—
What a magnificent place for a child to grow up!
And yet the children end in the river of price-fixing,
Or in the snowy field of the insane asylum.
The sleet falls—so many cars moving toward New York—
Last night we argued about the Marines invading Guatemala in 1947,
The United Fruit Company had one water spigot for two hundred families,
And the ideals of America, our freedom to criticize,
The slave systems of Rome and Greece, and no one agreed.
Compare the effective strategy of this poem to others in his brilliant book, The Light Around The Body, for example, the opening lines of “The Great Society”:
Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain;
Hands developed with terrible labor by apes
Hang from the sleeves of evangelists;
There are murdered kings in the lightbulbs outside movie theaters;
The coffins of the poor are hibernating in piles of new tires.
This is not history, this is tirade in lines. As in the Shelley poem above, we get the anger without ballast, the “I say it’s spinach and the hell with it” position. I don’t say it’s a bad poem, or valueless, only that it missed a chance for completion; it could have been better had it not gone to comic-strip imagery (a problem that afflicts and destroys his most ambitious anti-war poem, “The Teeth Mother Naked At Last”). Perhaps we are comforted, if we agree with the poet’s point of view, by the poem’s validation of our views—the way bonfires and pitchforks can offer comfort to a restless crowd by showing it what it wants to see, amping and validating its anger prior to marching to the target of its rage; but I doubt that any serious reader would look at this as a fair statement of current history. Consider, for comparison, another great anti-war poem of the 60’s, Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” Many things make this poem unique, including the method of its composition: It originated as Ginsberg traveled across the midwest speaking into a little tape recorder, making what some have called “a proto-podcast.” About its composition he said, “With pauses maybe of a minute or two minutes between each line as I’m formulating it in my mind and the recording … I was in the back of a bus, talking to myself, except with a tape recorder. Every time I said something interesting to myself I put it on tape.”
The concerns of the poem are about the Vietnam war, but it is about more than war. It speaks about language, and about America, and evinces a belief that the war is in part caused or perhaps allowed by the corrupted language in use today in media and in politics, and the conservatism and attendant repression of our noblest and most free impulses that began in and continues in certain parts of the country. The speaker of this poem believes that purifying the language and opening ourselves to the great and powerful transcendent figures of language, literature, and spirituality can free us all and end the war:
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
The poem is generous to what it sees of the people and landscape of Kansas, and filled with images of the Midwest leavened with news reports about the war. The poem also uses images focusing on the sensuality and intimacy of the human body to humanize the violence of the war. Reading it or listening to it, one has the sense at times that Ginsberg has thrown open the doors of his poem to all the life around him. There is so much in this poem, and this may be a reason why it seems not to date, as so many other topical anti-war poems from that time have done.
Language, language
black Earth-circle in the rear window,
no cars for miles along highway
beacon lights on ceramic plain
language, language
over Big Blue River
chanting La illaha el (lill) Allah hu
revolving my head to my heart like my mother
chin abreast at Allah Eyes closed, blackness
vaster than midnight prairies,
Nebraskas of solitary Allah,
Joy, I am I
the lone One singing to myself
God come true—
Thrills of fear.
nearer than the vein in my neck—?
What if I opened my soul to sing to my absolute self
Singing as the car crash chomped thru blood & muscle
tendon skull?
What if I sang, and loosed the chords of fear brow?
What exquisite noise wd
Shiver my car companions?
I am the Universe tonite
riding in all my Power riding
chauffeured thru my self by a long haired saint with eyeglasses
What if I sang till Students knew I was free
of Vietnam, trousers, free of my own meat,
free to die in my thoughtful shivering Throne?
freer than Nebraska, freer than America—
May I disappear
in magic Joy-smoke! Pouf! reddish Vapor,
Faustus vanishes weeping & laughing
under stars on Highway 77 between Beatrice & Lincoln—
“Better not to move but let things be” Reverend Preacher?
We’ve all already disappeared!
The poems I have cited so far have all been older ones, but I do not want to give the impression that this kind of work is only achieved in older forms or by older poets. Here are two more recent poems, both as it happens by women. The first is from Squander (Omnidawn, 2016), by Elena Karina Byrne, a poet, editor, and multi-media artist. She is poetry consultant and moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, literary programs director for the Ruskin Art Club, served as regional director of the Poetry Society of America for 12 years, and has also served as executive director of AVK Arts.
During the Vietnam War
... only the new growth grass was wet behind her head and back.
She could feel it and she could smell the grass rising up around her,
saw the whole sky and saw the sky in its de facto language
even though she was only seven. The year held out
a bird skull in its opened hand, whole.
Other birds were singing in a French film with no subtitles.
It was black and white. But the sky was definitely blue, an invention
of blue. A vector and hinge and rung of only
blue already there, no matter where you looked.
It took a long time. She looked a long time and in lockstep
pressed the tips of her fingers into the mole-black dirt
between grass blades. Only, this is
the wrong story: she did not doom or injure
any animals but she was restless then, and she was
glad she was not safe.
It is a picture poem, and it is not slight. It is about the passage of time and the adoption of a quickening sense of danger in life, learning that the two worlds, of imagination and this other where we live our lives and record what we see, the child and the adult, the world and the cinema, are the same, and that both are made special by that sameness for the observer. It is a quiet poem, but to me, it grows in force significantly and calls me back to look because of its accuracy, its magic.
The second poem is from an impressive long sequence by Kathleen Ossip, from her book, July (Sarabande Books, 2021). Ms. Ossip is the author of several acclaimed books, and teaches at The New School in New York. The long title poem in this book, “July” is about a road trip from Bemidji, MN, to Key West, FL, with her daughter riding shotgun. In some ways its method is much like the Ginsberg poem noted above, as she sees and records what she sees and her thoughts about it. But the poem that is most impressive to me in this collection is the twenty-two section “Goddess,” about the 2016 election and the effort to find peace or at least an equilibrium afterward. In this effort the poem plunders the present and seeks values from the past, in Dante’s Paradisio. The sections of the poem share a sonnet-like 13-line form, but there are exceptions. In its quest for equilibrium the poem mingles present events, politics, Dante, Beatrice, friends, news events, really everything, with the personal; nothing escapes its eye. Here is a sense of it, how it sweeps up everything before, behind, and near it:
1. {The election; Muri cries; I decide to read Paradiso as antidote}
The moon was very halved. The girl on the phone sobbed
I didn’t think it could happen. All nature and human nature
seemed halved in one quick night. She had canvassed and canvassed,
a behavior we believed artistic. The hammered throng mobbed
the hotel ballroom, glared and danced: picture
of an evil species, bareassed.
And sloppy greed for the easy fix, the dumbest.
And I too dumb to see a fix. The future lost its color.
When Dante climbed away from the vile circles,
he swapped saints for criminals
and the lines pushed onward, duller.
Dull or not, I craved rigor. I crowdsourced a translation.
I found dull Paradiso online and clicked on one iteration.
2. {I look up two words; Beatrice points out the immorality of optimism}
Reading Paradiso, I couldn’t remember
what fascist and demagogue precisely meant.
I kept looking them up: A person
who is extremely right-wing or authoritarian.
A political leader who seeks support by appealing to prejudice, not logic.
That way, it turned out, many of us leant.
Optimism was blindered, immoral. Therefore we had greatest need of it.
Sure it’s an artwork but we needed a prayer.
Dante read the world of people as a book of morals
and the solar system as a concert en plein air
and Paradise a stage with lighting favorable.
You, optimist, have been–ahem–less than serious!
said the know-it-all bitch of Paradise, Beatrice.
8. {Apotheosis}
Like a suspect slipped I down.
My sallow face flushed vermilion;
my estrogen and its volatiles receded;
receded my beliefs, my opinions;
a calm followed, strong.
We think our part is the whole, that’s where we go terribly wrong.
Give me work, I said, something has to be done.
Like one acquitted did I rise.
Not blood-hot and personal: the world was fresh and general.
Everything cannot not change. Devise
another world, mellow and open and subtle?
What I’d been: a pinball struck, a knee tapped by a hammer,
struggling to understand, not struggling to care: a placeholder.
I’m not doing the full poem justice quoting these snippets, and can only give a sense of its totality; but the point is that the kind of poetry I am suggesting here—that can be useful, beautiful, aesthetically accurate, and effective—has many forms and methods, but one purpose, and that is to deliver the full news about the time and place in which we live, and that the act of doing so makes it useful for all time, affirming its truth as well as its humanity, for all of us.
Here finally is another poem that I think very effective in its positions by accomplishing completeness rather than settling for thinness of judgment, Kenneth Rexroth’s beautiful and moving “Autumn in California.” There is a judgment in the poem, but it is made, when it comes, by nature, organically, by the brown fog and the cry of birds that closes the piece, rather than by any assertion of the poet. The poem reminds us that even in these “mild / And anonymous” seasons we cannot escape the world or its suffering, but that it is not the individuals suffering that goes on, but the world itself with its own songs and beauty. I will end this essay with the poem:
Autumn in California
Autumn in California is a mild
And anonymous season, hills and valleys
Are colorless then, only the sooty green
Eucalyptus, the conifers and oaks sink deep
Into the haze; the fields are plowed, bare, waiting;
The steep pastures are tracked deep by the cattle;
There are no flowers, the herbage is brittle.
All night along the coast and the mountain crests
Birds go by, murmurous, high in the warm air.
Only in the mountain meadows the aspens
Glitter like goldfish moving up swift water;
Only in the desert villages the leaves
Of the cotton woods descend in smoky air.
Once more I wander in the warm evening
Calling the heart to order and the stiff brain
To passion. I should be thinking of dreaming, loving, dying,
Beauty wasting through time like draining blood,
And me alone in all the world with pictures
Of pretty women and the constellations.
But I hear the clocks in Barcelona strike at dawn
And the whistles blowing for noon in Nanking.
I hear the drone, the snapping high in the air
Of planes fighting, the deep reverberant
Grunts of bombardment, the hasty clamor
Of anti-aircraft.
In Nanking at the first bomb,
A moon-faced, willowy young girl runs into the street,
Leaves her rice bowl spilled and her children crying,
And stands stiff, cursing quietly, her face raised to the sky.
Suddenly she bursts like a bag of water,
And then as the blossom of smoke and dust diffuses,
The walls topple slowly over her.
I hear the voices
Young, fatigued and excited, of two comrades
In a closed room in Madrid. They have been up
All night, talking of trout in the Pyrenees,
Spinoza, old nights full of riot and sherry,
Women they might have had or almost had,
Picasso, Velasquez, relativity.
The candlelight reddens, blue bars appear
In the cracks of the shutters, the bombardment
Begins again as though it had never stopped,
The morning wind is cold and dusty,
Their furloughs are over. They are shock troopers,
They may not meet again. The dead light holds
In impersonal focus the patched uniforms,
The dog-eared copy of Lenin’s Imperialism,
The heavy cartridge belt, holster and black revolver butt.
The moon rises late over Mt. Diablo,
Huge, gibbous, warm; the wind goes out,
Brown fog spreads over the bay from the marshes,
And overhead the cry of birds is suddenly
Loud, wiry, and tremulous.
A last note: Perhaps one more consideration in this discussion of desirable poetic attributes—one that is true of all the poems cited approvingly in this brief essay despite the accidents of their subject matter or motivating incident—is the poetic power created in giving voice and recognition to individuals, the author’s own as well as the people of the poem. Mark Doty has discussed this brilliantly in “Tide of Voices: Why Poetry Matters Now” (at poets.org), and I want to add a little to his point here, in line with the argument of this essay. We live in an age in which the meaning of the identity of the individual, including his or her separateness and identifiable personhood is a fading value, a loss that accompanies the loss of privacy as an individually owned trait. We are commodified by government, businesses, politicians, tech giants, and churches as members of a group, part of a tribe, expected to adopt and react to the same values and stimuli, and to be affronted by the same transgressions, irrespective of whether they apply to us and ours personally (to use that antiquated word). This social homogenization, this loss of personal attribute, and the accompanying sense of loss of personal agency, makes our era different from others that preceded it, not only for the extent but also for the speed of the loss, some of it a surrender, some of it, surprisingly, an apparent willing act of giving away something that the giver will never get back.
One of the great powers of poetry—an oxymoronic power, to be sure—is to affirm individual worth against the world and against time, in the sense that the poem as written is a poem that could only have been written by that individual as himself or herself, in that individual voice, written today but not only for today. The oxymoron is that in an economic sense, nothing has less value than a poem: It cannot be owned, auctioned, willed, or retailed, only shared—that is, a house, a car, a computer, can be owned or done with in any of those venues and actions, but a poem can be read by anyone, seen by anyone, reproduced by anyone; and in these terms it has no quantifiable value. I suspect that it is the felt recognition of the individual value of the poem, of the act of writing a poem, that has resulted in the explosion of poetry in our time, for there are more poems, poets, readings, festivals, workshops, and books being published than at any time in my lifetime; and it may be that each of these acts is a revolt against the drag to the present’s loss of individualism and agency, a way of saying here, this could only have been done by me, and look, it has been done, and its value is the value I and only I can give it!
I mention this because it seems more important to me now than ever to speak, to assert ourselves, irrespective of political persuasion, philosophical viewpoint, or religious or spiritual affiliation, to assert our meaning and agency, by this act of speech that we call poetry. To speak, however, is not all; equally important is to affirm the individuality of others, in our lives and in our poems by allowing them life and by listening to them as they speak. To speak, to listen, to affirm: One of the things I love about the poems mentioned in this essay is that the characters in them, including their authors when presented as characters in the poem, are rounded, fleshed out, not discarded or reduced as members of a hated other, or an incidental stick figure to an argument or assertion. That generosity of perception is a part of what makes the poems real and whole, and gives them their power; the affirmation of human value is what makes poems and poetry necessary and, in our sense, invaluable.
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