Why poetry?

Wandering through a local bookstore the other day, I came across Dorianne Laux’s Finger Exercises for Poets (Norton, 2024) on the poetry shelf, and, intrigued by the title, read a few pages and couldn’t resist buying the book and taking it home.

Laux, a poet whose work includes Only as the Day is Long, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, teaches in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. Her book is filled with the kind of wisdom about writing and poetry that will inspire you to rush to your desk and begin writing. 

“This is what I think all poetic narratives seek to do,” writes Laux, “create stories within stories, layer upon layer of feeling and meaning, spinning it out like a spider, weaving this delicate net that holds time and space, image and language, clarity and mystery.”

Have you ever wondered what happens when we write a poem? 

Here’s Laux’s response to that question: 

“When we write a poem, we dissolve into the universe, and wake up refreshed and alive.”

“Each poem,” according to Laux, “is a thank-you note to that miracle. To each day we have been given as a gift.”

And if you’ve ever wondered why we write or read poetry, you might enjoy what Laux has to say in the section of her book, “Why Poetry?”:

You may as well ask, Why sunsets? Why bicycles? Why gnats and human beings? Why trees? Why the small and larger things that make up this world? Why stars? Why dust? We swirl around and inside of chaos. The word we’re born into is a noisy, messy, confusing place full of moments of boredom and surprise. We are in the center of our lives always, and yet there are times we feel on the outside looking in, a question on our lips, unable to formulate it, or if we do manage to find words, speak them, we can only hope they can capture some of what that chaotic world inside feels like. And if we do, if we are able, for a moment, the world both without and within simultaneously stills, sits motionless between ourselves and others, ourselves and the world. We feel a semblance of satisfaction and achievement, something like joy.

And she shares what Tu Fu, who is considered one of China’s greatest poets of the Tang dynasty, has to say about poetry: “Poetry is like being alive, twice.”

In Laux’s words, “poetry is a place set aside in the imagination, in the soul, for pure making, pure being. Most of our lives are spent in prescribed fashion, where to go, what to wear, who to meet when, to what purpose? Our thoughts are taken mostly with questions of preparation, execution, completion.”

“This is why poetry: to carve a moment out of the chaos,” writes Laux, “to live the moments we are most alive into what we are built to be, sense-making and nonsense-making machines, all our powers working together: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, fully being in this world we’ve been given as a gift, making it ours through art, and then giving it away.”

For more information about Dorianne Laux and her work, visit: https://www.doriannelaux.net/

Between the lines: Nadia Colburn’s "I Say The Sky"

A good friend who knows how much I love reading (and writing) poems mailed me a copy of Nadia Colburn’s collection of poems, I Say The Sky (University Press of Kentucky), which contains the kind of poems that help open a reader’s eyes to the wonders and beauty of our world.

In one of the poems, “March,” I love the way Colburn explores the passing of winter and the coming spring and how she draws parallels to what might be melting in us.

“What in you needs melting?” she writes.

“What do you do with your anger and your hope?”

And I love the way she begins the poem:

All winter, we walked on the fallen sky,

walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth.

How do you make sense of the line “All winter, we walked on the fallen sky”?

What image does “the fallen sky” bring to mind?

When I read the next line… “walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth”… I felt as if the clouds themselves had fallen to earth.

And that image of walking on clouds, as if the sky has fallen, led me to wonder how and why Colburn was comparing the clouds to snow, or snow to clouds.

It’s as if the snow itself is made of clouds, and, to carry the image further, as if we ourselves are made of the same stuff as the clouds— the condensation that forms the clouds— so that it’s as if we ourselves have fallen to earth.

And listen to how she takes the image of clouds further in the next stanza:

Now the clouds are running down the side of the mountain

in small hidden rivers.

Isn’t that just how spring comes?

Snowmelt runs swiftly down mountainsides in small, almost hidden rivers?

Clouds turn to snow that turns to streams… in the way that each spring the world transforms itself, changing again from one form of being to another.

Just like humans, who, like the earth, change and awaken in hidden places that we cannot see until growth occurs.

Colburn alludes to these hidden changes:

All night, down the side of the mountain,

Waters run together where we cannot see.

And again: “Underneath, the earth is awakening.”

And spring comes again each March:

Once more the tips of bare branches

put out new buds.

And in a final stroke of brilliance, she writes:

Again they clasp

their small palms together in prayer.

It’s this final line that brings together heaven and earth in such a powerful way, a moment of new buds clasping one another like palms brought together in prayer.

In making this connection, Colburn takes her readers into an annual rite of passage, the transformation of the earth (and of us), a moment when human and divine seem to come together.

“March” is a poem that contains these gem-like miracles, just as the other poems in this collection contain similar gems.

Thanks to Colburn for bringing such a wonderful collection of poems into the world, and thanks to my good friend for sharing Colburn’s work with me.

If you’d like to read more about Nadia Colburn, visit: 

https://nadiacolburn.com/

You can read her poem, “March,” and other poems here: https://nadiacolburn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Ten-Poems-revised-2.pdf

On the power of poetry

Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the US, shares her thoughts on writing and the power of poetry in a slim volume, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry (Scribner). 

When she begins writing, Limón notes, she wants to make something true and asks herself questions: 

"Do I want to break something, or do I want to mend something? Or simply try to carve out a small place to breathe?"

And if she's lucky, she says, "if I'm quiet enough, lines of poems I love start to move through me. They come to me as if through a necessary beckoning."

Limón suggests that one of the secret powers of poetry is the way a poem connects us to other voices. 

"This is the secret power of poetry. Little engines of sound urging us on, telling us we are not alone, because we can't be; we are  connected to the readers and writers of poetry."

Is any poem ever a failure, she asks, because it goes unpublished or unshared?

"No, because didn't it make you pay attention, the act of writing? Didn't you, even briefly, feel as if you inhabited the world? Didn't it, for a moment, make you feel connected to language? Didn't you find a container for your heart?"

Is there a way to learn how to write a poem?

"While there are ways to teach poetry," Limón says, "mostly we learn by reading and writing, writing and reading, and then going out into the terrifying world and feeling so much that those feelings threaten to collapse us onto the concrete, facedown and forever ruined by human cruelty or even love. And then something happens; there's some moment when you think, a little gravel on your cheek, 'This suffering might make for a good poem.' Or, 'This wonder might make for a good poem.'"

One of the other secret powers of poetry, she writes, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make money writing poems, which allows poetry to remain subversive. "Poetry has the benefit of being outside economic systems."

"Is that a fancy way of saying that poetry doesn't make money? Yes. But it's more than that: Poetry is meant to be free, it's meant to be given, it's meant to travel one poem at a time, like pollen from a tree floating through the air to make more trees. Poems travel that same way. And because of that, they remain sacred, unbothered by trappings of the usual oppressive systems."

Another reason why poetry is powerful, according to Limón, is because of its existence in questions without forcing answers. 

"It's the opposite of a polemic, or a prescription; instead, it's an interrogation of the world and one's place within it. That said, even though it doesn't hold answers, perhaps it is an answer."

Why write or read poetry? 

"At this very moment we need to gather strength and resilience and compassion in any way that we can," Limón writes. "Perhaps poetry, for you, is the secret place where you can get to be as free and as safe as you can; perhaps you can make that blank page a place where you can lay down everything you need to lay down. Maybe it's where you go to get stronger; maybe it's where you go to become softer. But know there is a place that you can make on the page that no one controls but you. In that, right there, is a mighty power."

To learn more about Ada Limón and her work, visit: https://adalimon.com/