5 Reasons Why Despite Pronouncements to the Contrary, Poetry Just Won’t Die
I write the poems that bite back. -Neruda Perdomo at 8 years old.
A few weeks ago I had this rather unpleasant confrontation with another writer of color in cyberspace because I disagreed vehemently with their announcement that poetry is dead and poets are cliquish, etc. (well, not so much the latter; poets certainly have the capacity to be exclusive – we’re human and like other humans we’re not obligated to be friends with people we don’t like or respect though we certainly have a responsibility to listen and advocate for under-represented voices).
Of course the irony is that poetry ain’t mad that some people believe or want it dead. Poetry has room for any of us to question its existence (I would add precisely because it is a living art!). And while I do not usually feel personally offended by critiques of poetry, or of poets, even – hell I engage in both those exercises all the time – a statement like that by someone I felt an affinity to felt like a kick to the gut, because we were both part of a community of writers of color whose basic premises were a) respect for each other’s projects and b) common ground as people who have experienced systemic silencing. As a poet in that community, I felt attacked and betrayed. The statement didn’t come off as a “critique”, but as a denouncement.
This experience galvanized me to pen the reasons why I believe poetry remains a vital, necessary and relevant aspect of human experience, especially in our contemporary world. I took inspiration from Neruda, the son of my teacher and brilliant poet Willie Perdomo, to well, “bite back”. So here’s my list of why I believe poetry is going to outlive us all -
1. Poetry asks us to be curious and positions us as investigators of life. Each problem, question, emotion, desire, doubt we confront and navigate in our lives is the heart of a poem, of many poems. To explore them, to give them a body, poets search for materials and deploy various strategies to offer a response. Not an answer. Not a solution. As form of engagement, poetry works to challenge our assumptions of what we think we know about our world, ourselves, each other. It trains us to be close and critical readers of our own perceptions, to re-arrange their component parts into alternate, diverse, at times diverging and often surprising, possibilities. I think the most succinct way to put it is simply that poetry teaches us wonder and exercises our visionary capacities as we grapple with what it means to live, to continue. This is why Audre Lorde wrote that, “poetry is not a luxury,” especially for bodies and subjectivities that have been oppressed, criminalized, stigmatized, broken.
2. Poetry is an emotional and spiritual endeavor. Poets draw both on abstract and concrete constructs as materials for poems – sensations, memories, myths, history, news, metaphysical concepts, etc. How we choose to arrange them in response to a particular problem creates pathways that can either reveal or obstruct emotional/spiritual truth. Speaking on race as a social construct a couple months ago at Rutgers-Camden, Michael Eric Dyson remarked that, “Just because it ain’t real doesn’t mean it ain’t true.” I believe this observation is applicable here as well. Poetry is not a copy of what we perceive. It’s a process of unraveling what we perceive to illuminate what it is in a scene, an image, an event, a character, a sound, that moves us. It is a quest to come closer to ourselves and experience the power, which – in spite of incredible violence and disciplinary measures applied by those with the means and intent to deprive, fragment and alienate us from ourselves – allows us to experience our own abundance and transformation.
3. Poetry rewards us with revelation. Surrendering to the uncertainty and murk of the blank page can lead us to unexpected places. Because the blank page is not empty. When I come to it, I experience it more as a blizzard, and language is the stick I am using to gauge my relative position within that chaos. And I can’t even really define what I am after once I set out because it is not necessarily something recognizable. I just know when I reach that ecstasy of arrival – of being face to face, for a moment, with what is unspeakable in my soul, of touching a truth which escapes, exceeds language and which, yet, I live on. I believe the thirst for revelation is what compels all our efforts at communication. It expands our hope for empathy, our capacity to remember and to be, as Meena Alexander puts it, “reconciled to the world we live in” (and by reconciliation meaning it helps us claim our portion in the world, to be implicated in it and not complacent of the injustices we suffer, witness and participate in); it endows us with greater choice on how to be. The most ardent, unapologetic example of poetry as revelation, poet as prophet, for me is Joy Harjo, who I am blessed to call a mentor.
4. Poetry is an inherently social practice that draws strength from solitude. It might seem cliche, but it bears repeating that poetry is written for, by and to somebody. It is that part of my spirit that cannot be captured in narrative, theory, or history; it is the rhythms, colors, waves of what Yusef Komunyaaka calls, “the eminent silence,” within me reaching out to and attempting to glimpse yours. Because that silence, like the blank page, is not empty. It is a reckoning. It is many reckonings. Stanley Kunitz wrote of poetry that it is “a sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity.” I love this definition because while I make no assumptions of you, reader, I certainly have experienced my most persistent demons to thrive within myself, even if they were birthed and forced into my psyche initially through the actions of others. In poetry, the distinction between self and other simultaneously blurs and clarifies; the body houses what it travels through.
5. Poetry is for everybody. Not everyone writes poetry, but poetry matters for all of us. Our oldest historical memories that have transmitted to us the tensions and densities of what it has meant to be human (incompletely of course because of the widespread exclusion of women), come largely from poets whether in text (Homer, Rumi, Sappho, etc.) or in the oral traditions inherited and adapted from generation to generation (for instance, the wayang kulit tradition in my country). Learning how to read and appreciate poetry is learning how to read and appreciate our soul – that song in us which is shaped by and yet transcends history. If today much of poetry has been appropriated by academic institutions – in terms of recognition (i.e. credentialism), copyright, readership – let us not allow ourselves to be deceived or deprived of its affirmation of life. I see and hear it in the young people I’ve worked with and have been – struggling with loss, violence, grief beyond their years – whose impulse to cry, “I exist!” emerges in poetry. I am in correspondence with a young man living in a refugee camp in Malawi and what do we send each other? Poems. As he put it in one of his letters, “Poetry is just a good companion to me, she’s the one I feel much comfortable to express my feelings to, way of my life!!” Poetry is ours to make and nourish each other with. It is what history cannot break in and out of us.
So. I understand that poems written by people who do not reflect us can be alienating. And poets can act the fool. But for every poem we claim has nothing to offer us, there are hundreds that will cry with us in our darkest hours and give succor to those salvaged parts of us. For every poet that acts the fool, there are those we can return to again and again when we are friendless, motherless, childless, lost (these just a few of mine that seem to either reside permanently on my desk or are constantly getting pulled off the shelf) -
Joy Harjo How We Became Human
Mahmoud Darwish The Butterfly’s Burden
Derek Walcott The Bounty
Rainer Maria Rilke Uncollected Poems
Raul Zurita INRI
Audre Lorde Black Unicorn
Suheir Hammad breaking poems
Chris Abani Sanctificum
Federico Garcia Lorca Poet in New York
Agha Shahid Ali Rooms are Never Finished
Jimmy Santiago Baca Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
Patrick Rosal Boneshepherds
Stanley Kunitz Passing Through
Willie Perdomo Smoking Lovely
Philip Levine The Simple Truth
Cornelius Eady The Gathering of My Name
Aracelis Girmay Kingdom Animalia
Nathaniel Mackey What Said Serif
Barbara Jane Reyes Diwata
Natasha Trethewey Native Guard
Ross Gay Against Which
Eavan Boland Domestic Violence
Yusef Komunyakaa Neon Vernacular
June Jordan Kissing God Goodbye
Nikki Finney Head Off and Split
Martin Espada The Republic of Poetry
Samuel Hazo Silence Spoken Here
…and recently, a gift from my husband (and favorite poet, Seve Torres), Stuart Dybek’s Streets in Their Own Ink, which is pure luminosity.
And perhaps this is the best defense at the end of the day, for why poetry matters – in that it needs none. It is bigger than all of us poets and our reasons, though it is certainly useful once in a while to have reminders why it is we are committed to this work, which so often provides little to no material reciprocity in a world where our economic existence as working-poor folks, women, people of color, etc. has been and is becoming increasingly tenuous. A world where poetry is necessary as bread. Hope this post encourages you to take a bite.
light. one love. salaam.
