I'm stealing the title of my blog today from Gerry Stern's great
poem/book of the same title. It's not simply because I love that book,
that poem, and that poet. It because my friend Christina Hutchins,
another of my favorite poets (and the Poet Laureate of Albany,
California) just texted me not long after she had finished readings
poems for the San Francisco Public Radio station KQED. I'd asked her to
let me know how it went when she'd finished, and Christina's text read:
"SO cool! the producer cried said he had forgotten how he NEEDS
poetry 2 be hearing it 2 be fully human being a poet's a lucky
thing." This seemed to me to reflect a couple of truths we all tend to
forget periodically — "we," meaning not just those whose
contact with poems, poets, and poetry is sporardic and accidental, but
even those of us who live in the constant weathers of poetry — perhaps
most of all, those of us who have chosen to draw poetry all around us in
our daily lives.
We need to recall the elemental importance and
urgency of poetry, the subtle nurture and the profound grace it allows
in our otherwise rudimentary and often punishing lives. And, as
Christina says, we need to remember how lucky we all are to able to do
what we do, to bring to language — the language of our poems — the
complexities of thought and passion, the tastes of words, and the
rhythmic verbal seductions of ideas and hopes. I know, a little
rapturous, but deal with it.
Since I began teaching more than
thiry years ago, an identical event has happend to me each year, often
two or three times in any given year. What happens is this: someone who
has called from the outside, meaning outside whatever school I am
teaching at (this has happened to me at Oberlin College, The Johns
Hopkins University, and at USC, where I presently teach), has been
routed to me because they have a poetry question, and I am the poet at
hand. The person asks me to help them try to locate a particular poem
they once read in high school or an early survey class in college, often
many years ago.These are not people who normally read poetry, or even
much literature at all, it often seems. They don't know the author or
the title of the poem, but they tell me what they do remember and,
because anthologies tend to replicate themselves like space aliens, I
can often tell them exactly the poem they are looking for.
After
this happened half a dozen times to me during my first year at Oberlin, I
began asking the callers why they were looking for their particular
poem, and the answer was always the same. They had recently lost someone
close to them — a parent, a sibling, a daughter, a son — and they
felt they needed to find this poem, this particular poem that they
rememebered from their past, often from a time deep in their past. Now,
it's important to remember that these poems that they were looking for
often had nothing to do with death. Yet in every case the callers had
this memory of having had a profound connection with a particular poem,
with the way the power and the language of the poem reflected for them
some exceptional experience, or emotion, or illumination within them.
What
became clear to me was that these callers all recognized that, at that
present moment when they were calling me, they had no language that was
commensurate with their own grief, no words with which to express not
only to others but also to themselves the dimensions of their own loss
and suffering. They semed to believe that if they could only read again
this one particular poem that had so touched them, that had released in
them such powerful connections years before, that perhaps now they might
once again be able to connect some words, some language to the riot of
grieving they were experiencing. I don't even think this was a truly
conscious recognition of this fact; I always feel (and it continues to
happen to me) that these callers are intuitively seeking out what must
be for many of them one of the few times that they had been able to see
and feel language forged against experience.
It is at times like
those, talking to those callers, that I remember what a lucky thing it
is to be a poet. It is something we need to remind each other, as
Christina reminded me today, as well as ourselves.
(ed note: this post first appeared here on May 9, 2009 — sdh)