Poetry: Our Humanist Scripture

Poetry is about human potential, the power of understanding. Poetry affirms our commonality-that out of the unique words, experience, and imagination of the poet, a commonality exists that means others can hear, accept, understand the poem, the power to create and to share the creation and even have it expanded by others by their interpretation.

Poetry is often prophetic, challenging us, our culture, our apathy, our inattentiveness to nature, to others, to life.

Poetry has, according to the great poet William Carlos Williams, another task: “The poet writes to become a better person.” It is not therapy, but a process by which one finds a meansof “accepting one’s life as valid,” as Richard Hugo writes. It gives this task to the reader or hearer as well-to be open to change, to new insight and truth, to becoming. The reader’s responsibility is as great as the writers.

Poetry is more personal than other art forms. The medium of poetry is one persons body. When people read a poem aloud they encounter it physically. They feel it vibrate inside their throat and chest, and they use the music of the lines to remember the words.

Robert Pinsky, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/3/98

Poetry aids our memory as well as our present and future, a memory that grows increasingly important to us through the years. For example, in part of a poem by Adrienne Rich we hear:

Open the book of tales you knew by heart,
begin driving the old roads, again,
repeating the old sentences, which have changed
minutely from the wording you remembered.

Reopen the book. A light mist soaks the page,
blunt naked buds tip the wild lilac scribbled
at the margin of the road, no one knows when.

You whose stories these farms secrete,
you whose absence these fields publish,
all you whose lifelong travail
took as given this place and weather
who did what you could with the means you had —
it was pick and shovel work
done with a pair of horses, a stone boat
a strong back, and an iron bar; clearing pasture —
Your memories crouched, foreshortened in our
text. Page torn. New words crowding the old.

I knew a woman who walked
straight across our stubble in her bare feet
away,
women who said, He’s a good man, never
laid a hand to me as living proof.
A man they said fought death
to keep fire for his wife for one more winter,
leave
a woodpile to outlast him.

Such details get bunched, packed, stored
in these cellar-holes of memory
so little is needed
to call on the power, though you can’t
name its name:
It has its ways of coming back:
a truck going into gear on the crown
of the road
the white-throat sparrow’s notes
the moon in her fullness standing
right over the concrete steps the way
she stood the night they landed there.

From here
nothing has changed, and everything.

Time’s power, the only just power-would
you give it away?

Adrienne Rich, “Living Memory”

Poetry teaches us life’s lessons, or prepares us for them:

How easy it is to sentimentalize
suffering, to love it as the Rabbi said,
more than God does. I don't know why
I remembered this today, what I didn't know

I'd forgotten, thirty years in the past:
In the city with my mother to shop
I'm walking along, oblivious with anticipation,
imagining the Childhoods of Famous Americans arrayed
in their orange bindings on Cokesbury's bookshelves
and christmas money in my pocket.

I love these stories in which there is often
poverty, and even death, though children
grow up, despite it all, to do great things
and happiness is reward for virtue. And then I see
the girl — woman, really, but young — walking
toward me down the street. She's dressed in white.,

a waitresses uniform maybe, but I don't notice
if she's plain or pretty, I'm so amazed by what
I see. As she walks she's reading a letter and
tears river down her cheeks without a sound. For a
moment there's no sound anywhere, it's like a silent movie,
and I keep looking at her face, which is awash
with grief and pain. She just walks right by and I
turn and stare after her until my mother comes back

to pull me forward. I don't even wonder why
she's crying, though I could invent good reasons.
All I can think of is her face: that I know
something now, know it for the first time and forever —

I will not forget it, though I may forget
the circumstances of its learning — that
there are those who suffer, even unto death,
and are not me, and cannot be consoled.

Susan Woods, “Dear Everyone”

Philip Booth seeks to teach his daughter in First Lesson:

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Naomi Shihab Nye encourages a friend in My Friends Divorce:

I want her
to dig up
every plant
in her garden
the pansies
the pentas
roses
ranunculus
thyne and lilies
the thing nobody knows
the name of
unwind the morning glories
from the wire windows
of the fence
take the blooming
and the almost-blooming
and the dormant
especially the dormant
and then
and then
plant them in her new yard
on the other side
of town
and see how
they breathe

Poetry teaches us respect for ourselves, for others, for the natural world. as Hayden Carruth says in

Outrage

This has been the time of the finishing off of
the animals. They are going away-their fur and
their wild eyes, their voices. Deer leap and
leap in front of the screaming snowmobiles until
they leap out of existence. Hawks circle once or
twice around their shattered nests and then they
climb to the stars. I have lived with them fifty
years, and now they are going almost gone. I
don't know if the animals are capable of reproach.
But clearly they do not bother to say good-bye.

Poetry brings us a new way of seeing things — and the truth that comes with it:

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with exactly the same kisses.
. . . . .
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

Poetry bring us a new way of seeing things - and the humor that comes with it.

“Hockey”

1. The Goalie

The Boston College team has gold helmets, under which the long black hair of the Roman centurion curls out..And they begin. How weird the goalies look with their african masks! The goalie is so lonely anyway, guarding a basket with nothing in it, his wide lower legs wide as ducks No matter what gift he is given, he always rejects it... He has a number like 1, a name like Mrazek, sometimes wobbling his legs waiting for the puck, or curling up like a baby in the womb to hold it, staying a second too long on the ice.

The goalie has gone out to mid-ice, and now he sails sadly back to his own box, slowly; he looks prehistoric with his rhineocerous legs; he looks as if he is going to become extinct, and he’s just taking his time

When the players are at the other end, he begins sadly sweeping the ice in front of his house; he is the old witch in the woods,waiting for the children to come home.

2. The Attack

They all come hurrying back toward us, suddenly, knees dipping like oil wells; they rush toward us wildly, fins waving, they are pike swimming toward us, their gill fins expanding like the breasts of opera singers, no, they are twelve hands practicing penmanship on the same piece of paper..

Now the goalie is desperate . . . he looks wildly over his left shoulder, rushing toward the other side of his cave, like a mother hawk whose chicks are being taken by two snakes . . . suddenly he flops on the ice like a man trying to cover a whole double bed. He has the puck. He stands up, turns to his right, and drops it on the ice at the right moment; he saves it for one of his children, a mother hen picking up a seed and then dropping it.

Robert Bly

Poetry teaches us about our limits, about life’s natural processes.

The child’s foot is not yet aware it’s a foot,
and would like to be a butterfly or an apple.

But in time, stones and bits of glass,
streets, ladders,
and the paths in the rough earth
go on teaching the foot that it cannot fly,
cannot be a fruit bulging on the branch.
Then, the child’s foot
is defeated, falls
in the battle,
is a prisoner
condemned to live in a shoe.>

Bit by bit, in that dark,
it grows to know the world in its own way,
out of touch with its fellow, enclosed,
feeling out life like a blind man.

These soft nails
of quartz, bunched together,
grow hard, and change themselves
into opaque substance, hard as horn,
and the tiny, petalled toes of the child
grow bunched and out of trim,
take on the form of eyeless reptiles
with triangular heads, like worms.
Later, they grow calloused
and are covered
with the faint volcanoes of death,
a coarsening hard to accept.

.But this blind thing walks
without respite, never stopping
for hour after hour,
the one foot, the other,
now the man’s,
now the woman’s,
up above,
down below,
through fields, mines,
markets and ministries,
backwards,
far afield, inward,
forward,
this foot toils in its shoe,
scarcely taking time
to bare itself in love or sleep;
it walks, they walk,
until the whole man chooses to stop.

And then it descended
underground, unaware,
for there, everything, everything was dark.
It never knew it had ceased to be a foot
or if they were buying it so that it could fly
or so that it could become
an apple.

Pablo Neruda “To The Foot From Its Child” "

Poetry teaches us about the richness of our personalities and the complexity of our behavior and judgment.

Poetry helps us to see the ordinary as extraordinary, laden with emotion and meaning.

Kings don’t touch doors.

They don’t know this joy: to push affectionately or fiercely before us one of those huge panels we know so well, then to turn back in order to replace it-holding a door in our arms.

The pleasure of grabbing on of those tall barriers to a room abdominally, by its porcelain knot; of this swift fighting, body-to-body, when, the forward motion for an instant halted, the eye opens and the whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.

But it still keeps one friendly hand on the door, holding it open, then decisively pushes it away, closing itself in-which the click of the powerful but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

Francis Porge, “The Door”

Most of all, poetry is the closest to a sacred language that humanists have, because, poetry, at its best, helps to make us whole persons, merging our reason, our experience, our tradition, and our senses into an integrity of spiritual dimensions.

Poetry is inner theater, it is the language that saves, poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of the soul's adventure in time and history, as Stanley Kunitz says.

While things are settling down,
here I've left my testament,
my shifting extravagaria,
so whoever goes on reading it
will never take in anything
except the constant moving
of a clear and bewildered man,
a man rainy and happy,
lively and autumn-minded.

And now I’m going behind
this page, but not disappearing
I’ll dive into clear air
like a swimmer in the sky,
and then get back to growing
till one day I’m so small
that the wind will take me away
and I won’t know my own name
and I won’t be there when I wake.

Then I will sing in the silence.

Neruda, “Autumn Testament”

Poetry helps us to know life can sing.

Between what I see and what I say,
between what I say and what I keep silent,
between what I keep silent and what I dream,
between what I d ream and what I forget:
poetry.
      It slips
between yes and no,
      says
what I keep silent,
      keeps silent
what I say,
      dreams
what I forget.
      It is not speech:
it is an act.
      It is an act
of speech.
      Poetry
speaks and listens:
      it is real.
And as soon as I say
      it is real,
it vanishes.
      Is it then more real?
Tangible idea,
      intangible
word:
      poetry
comes and goes
      between what is
and what is not.
      It weaves
and unweaves reflections.
      Poetry
scatters eyes on a page,
scatters words on our eyes.
Eyes speak,
      words look,
looks think.
      To hear
thoughts,
      see
what we say,
      touch
the body of an idea.
      Eyes close,
the words open.

Octavio Paz, Between what I see and What I say

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