“Compassion and the abandonment of ego are both essential to art: it is easy to spot a poem…that is self-indulgent or brittle with cruel cleverness.”
– Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
My introduction to poetry was about as exciting as canned biscuits. I didn’t grow up reciting sonnets (to this day, I have failed to memorize any poem except “Two Boxes” by Shel Silverstein. Look it up. I’ll wait.) (It’s perfect, isn’t it?) I grew up with five sisters in a house without a father. Lots of estrogen. Lots of hairstyling products. My sisters were beautiful and talented and I sort of hated them. I was rebellious but not in the same way my peers; I had no lust for drugs or drinking and I remember laughing at my boyfriend one night as he kissed me tenderly in the woods, “Pal, if you think I’m going to sleep with someone from Ferndale, you’re mental.” Real romantic.
No, instead of skipping school with my sisters, I heckled the army recruiters who visited our schools and, for some reason that you must not hold against me because I was an angry teenager, I protested the Veterans Day assembly – I think I thought it was glorifying war. Don’t worry. I paid for my intolerance the first time someone spit on Tom and his friends as they walked to class in their ROTC uniforms. I saw myself in that cruelty. I hadn't spit on any ROTC students but my language had been hateful up until then. If I wanted to write poetry well and make it work with Tom, I needed to approach my feelings about the military with openness and compassion.
Here’s the canned biscuits part. I decided to write poetry because it was the only skill none of my sisters had mastered yet. No compelling eloquence, no way with words. I played violin but Michelle was a natural. I played softball but Tina was stronger. I danced and tried out for plays and barely squeaked by in physics and calculus when Alisa was forced to tutor me at night. But nobody seemed to notice poetry in my house, so I essentially licked its door handle and claimed it as my own.
I was terrible at it. Wretchedly, splendidly terrible. I tossed word salad: angsty mishmashes of imagery and manifestos. A boyfriend wrote me a poem theoretically titled “My Angel” and I returned it to him, wrote “Not your ‘angle’ – learn to spell” in the margin. Sure, I was a dick, but I had finally found something I could play with confidently, even in front of my sisters. Poetry was a blast! It was mine and it was on paper and I used Mr. Steiner’s copy code to print up hundreds of pages of it before the principal got wise. I hoarded poetry and moved to Seattle when I was eighteen to study creative writing at Seattle University, the tiny Jesuit school on Capitol Hill, where my instructors were magic and Sharon Cumberland taught at a senior center at night and I wanted to go too.
By the time I ended up at Pacific for my MFA, I had only published a handful of poems but my desperation was manageable because I had yet to think about what it meant to “succeed” as a poet. I was still having fun. I sent poems to my friends, to Marvin Bell and Peter Sears and David St. John, and when they enjoyed them I was the dog with a waggly tail. This is when I was most successful. This is when I was at my most playful. I had yet to apply to any PhD programs or read articles about the fall of higher education in America and the shifty shadows of the job market. I liked being published but had no sense of possession over my work; it was surprisingly easy to let go of. My need for control had faded since I left home and no longer felt compelled to compete with my sisters or, consequently, anyone else. To be honest, I was more concerned with Tom's deployments than publications.
My poems got better because I read more. Shelley and Wordsworth and the lais of Marie de France, then Amy Lowell and Mary Oliver, Louise Glück, Kay Ryan, William Stafford. (My favorite book of poems is a tattered copy of Raymond Carver's All of Us.) Success in poetry was writing poetry and nothing more. Lost Horse Press published Me and Coyote, my first chapbook, and Robert Peake wrote a touching review. Marvin presented some of my poems at a reading in Oregon. I read and read and read. Carol Muske-Dukes and Carolyn Kizer, Stanley Kunitz and Yusef Komunyakaa. I was successful only because I was fully immersed in what poetry could do when it reached people, and I was mostly unaware of the competition beneath it. Oh, I was still getting rejections in the mail, and I was launched into the poverty wages of adjunct work as soon as I graduated, but I was happy enough to write. That was all.
I struggle with many regrets, but meditation has allowed me to notice some small details I might otherwise miss: I may not have been a poetic prodigy, but instead of lamenting my ordinary nature I can see that I was delightfully fearless as a beginner. My younger self was rarely daunted by the challenges before her and struggled bravely and willingly.
Today, I wonder how that fearlessness and happiness escape me so quickly and with such stealth. Mindfulness allows me to keep up with retrieving them over and over. I think, sometimes, it becomes difficult to identify when we have been most successful in our lives – in poetry as in other fields. We have all experienced success. Maybe not as often as we’ve trudged through failures and mistakes, and we certainly don’t get everything we want, but we have all been high on our work at some point. Even if you can’t admit it now, I know you’ve experienced happiness in poetry; you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you hadn’t (unless you’re my Grandma Kusick, who will read this even though she doesn’t write poetry, and she will tell her friends to read it too because I am her granddaughter). So, let’s identify success through meditation.
I'll start by looking at the other side. To be fair, I can see some practicality in equating happiness with what others have: tenure, security, attention, privilege, charm, awards, seniority, whatever. When we focus on what others have, we become even more aware of what we need, and we do need some amount of material success. I enjoy having health insurance and praise and hot chocolate in my pantry. But it is important for me to think carefully about what fuels my need for the more basic material concepts of success. Why do I need what I need? Is it worthy of the actions and thoughts I produce while I pursue it? How much do I need, and when am I taking just to take? Poetry offers a great deal of “success” in material reward, and the act of slowing down to be aware of it all is crucial. More importantly, I must understand that my need for poetry is beyond material and will remain that way – there is a small cord connecting my self to poetry that cannot be cut or destroyed, not only because I value the happiness it brings me but because poetry is a product of my thoughts.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his book Work (an excellent text for those interesting in reading about methods of balancing meditation and professional demands) that we inherit our thoughts and actions, and that is all we inherit. Everyone forfeits their bodies and possessions; our thoughts and actions survive us. They continue in the lives of others. In the end, it doesn’t matter how much we know, but the way we treat others is crucial to our survival.
Consider, too, not only what you need for yourself but how much you need to give to others. We are connected by our humanity, and our actions against one another are actions against ourselves, against God, against the Buddha, against our nature. I need to praise others when they do good work because I am a part of what they need, and their needs are mine. I need strangers to smile at me in the grocery store when I’ve moved to yet another new city. I need someone to crack a joke in the Starbucks line, to hold the elevator, to shovel the driveway just to be nice. When I deprive others of kindness, I deprive myself, and when I give kindness, I receive it. I gain nothing from fear or anger.
To meditate is to be aware of everything that is happening in your body, your mind, and your surroundings. With that awareness, we notice what hurts and what brings us happiness. If we look deeply and allow ourselves to bring understanding to our suffering, to our joy, then we are much more likely to transform the suffering – to get to know our behaviors that cause sadness and anger, and to think about what it is we truly want from our work.
You make yourself vulnerable in your poetry, whether you write about what is real or you work through the imaginary. I learned that I cannot escape myself in my imagination, and that I am present even in my fear of war and how directly it affects my life and the lives of others. I am working to be present in my poems. And I will continue to struggle with feeling satisfied in poetry. The significance of the poems themselves will shrink when I am less aware of myself, my thoughts and my actions, and it will grow when I return through meditation.
I’m asking you to spin a lot of plates here. Tomorrow I want to look into mindfulness as the foundation of a good meditation practice.