I’ve always secretly thought of poetry as a cop out. A way
of not explaining what you mean and getting away with it. To me the worst way
of communicating. I’m coming to see saying what you mean without explaining it, may be the only way to truly say what
you mean. To own your words, your actions, your life without apology may be the
most genuine and world changing way of communicating. So I am becoming a poet.
I can say things like, “August tried to kill me.” And I don’t have to tell you
why or what that means to me to make it true. Yet it will be far richer if you
wonder what that means, if you ask how a month tried to take my life. Here’s
the thing: poetry invites relationship in a way prose never can. Prose tells, poetry
provokes. Don’t you wonder when you read my poem about the last year what it
means that August tried to kill me or that I walked into October with my real self? If you engage with me about my poetry you
will know me far more than if you simply read my prose. My poetry requires you
bring yourself. My prose simply requires you absorb information. The ladder is
not bad, but the former can change both of our lives. And of course I mean what I’m
saying but to me the far bigger truth is a metaphor—how do I live, not just write, poetry? After a lifetime of
explaining and defending, making my apology, I hear the call to let my words
make music instead of sense, my life make music instead of sense. I can only
make room for community by relinquishing the never ending monologue of my explanations and living in your sight in a way that doesn’t defend but
constantly invites engagement. Everything is on the table every day. To
God and to you. This is communion with God and this is communion with you.
I want to live in a way that only works if Jesus shows up, that means my defenses are down and my hope is rampant. And I need you to show
up too. I need you to ask questions. I need to know what you see. I want to be
friends, not innocuous observers. Friends are not innocuous. Neither is poetry.
I need you, not your approval. Everything is on the table. Jesus has to show up.
So, so good. Really thoughtful. Reminds me of a favorite poem of mine from University days:
ReplyDeletePoetry by Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and
school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.