SAYING IT: I AM A POET!
One of the best things about being eighty years old is knowing who you will be when you grow up. I am a poet. Underneath all the teaching, underneath the two Oxford non-fiction books, in the scariest place, the tenderest place, the most joyful place inside me — I am a poet.
When I was young, I thought the only real poets were the ones in books, and the very best poet in the world was T.S. Eliot. But one summer in the middle of my college years, I worked in a mission orphanage and school deep in the mountains of Appalachia. There was a cook in the school named Fanny Jane. She was missing two of her front teeth, and probably a good number of the back ones. One day she asked me, “Are there mountains where you live?”
I said, “No, but we do have hills.”
She looked up at Pine Mountain behind the orphanage and replied softly, “I don’t know what I’d do without mountains to rest my eyes against.”
And I knew, utterly knew, with a knowledge no teacher could ever take from me, that poets are everywhere. But even so, I did not dare to call myself “a poet.”
I have celebrated my truck-driver brother’s stories, I have loved the lyrics of good country-western poets (King of the Road,” “Jackson,” and the best of both white and black gospel lyrics. There are poets who drive Mack trucks deep in the night across this land. I’ve listened to poets in housing projects and jails, shy friends and bruised ex-Ph.D. students finding their way back to their own rich, beautiful, nuanced voices, children in detention writing finally the truth of what they see or what they imagine. Because the voice that begins in the fetus recognizing her mother’s voice, the voice that matures in the toddler for the first time saying a full sentence, already is musical. The cadence, the “minor fall, the major lift” as Leonard Cohen puts it.
Those who know me well recognize that what I have said above is my theme. This is my story, / This is my song . . . But . . .
. . . something new is happening for me. I have fallen in love with a poet for the second time in my life. Christian Wiman. (Sorry, T.S., but after half a century it’s probably time.) I’m not alone in my love – in fact, I’m a late-comer of a whole flock. And it’s really just one poem of his, and his books about poetry that have me besotted. He says somewhere, and I will find it again; here I misquote – he says either in his book, Ambition and Survival: On Becoming a Poet, or in My Bright Abyss, that there are two kinds of poets. There are those who write many poems, write profusely, and there are those who hunger desperately to write just one perfect poem.
I know which kind he is, because he has written a perfect poem. It is an invented form of his own; the form is half of what I love. It is also a revelation, an example of writing as a spiritual practice. That’s the other half of what I love. The poem is “God Goes Belonging.”
That one poem is a miracle of form, of music, of intuitive knowledge and of mature theological thought. I want to be a good enough poet to be able to do that. I have memorized it. I have tried to copy-cat it and of course it can’t be copy-catted. The miracle lies in the fullness of the original creation – form as well as content. Music as well as intense exploration.
I am eighty years old. I am who I will be when I grow up. I am a poet.
I have written for a lifetime in my original voice, in what what John Wideman calls “the language of home.” My foundation is solid. But on that foundation (rather than the foundation of grammar, grading, and graphite corrections on our pages) there is this amazing, beautiful challenge: the possibility that our own music, the music we first heard in the womb, the music we have been making as we talk all of our lives – that very music might be the wine that we pour into new vessels – that we offer to the world in the chalice of forms that we ourselves have created or that we have received through the study of poets whose work we have come to love. I have collected shelf full of books I want to study. Christian Wiman and Kay Ryan and Emily Dickinson and Billy Collins, and . . .
At eighty I can say it; I am a poet, and I have chosen my teachers. At last, I am ready.
I do hope you will write poems with me in Rowe in March. Click here to read more about it.
Or you can go directly to the Rowe website to register by clicking here.
