Poetry is an acquired taste. It’s like tea or coffee or wine, craft beer. I don’t think many people start out simply loving poetry or understanding how meaningful it is or can be. But poetry is a wonderful art. Poetry, of all the art forms, particularly helps us understand the power of words, of phrase, of sound and clause. It teaches us how a simple combination of words cause reverberations within the deepest crevices of our hearts. And these sounds, these words, they stir up emotions ways that seem to vibrate at very specific frequencies. Frequencies that can make the bones in our bodies resonate as if they were made of tuning forks. All great art has the ability to do this, but I think poetry is perhaps the most efficient at it.
I’ve fallen in love with poetry over the last few years. It’s probably closer to ten years, now. I wish I fell in love with it sooner. I do believe that anyone who has lost someone or experienced a tragedy of some sort has an easier time falling in love with poetry. That didn’t really happen for me until the last few years, so I won’t grumble about it too much.
People have sometimes praised me for my writing in the midst of hard circumstances, when life is particularly filled with questions or hardships or crises. But for me, that’s when I need the power of language, that’s when I need art to come flooding into my life. I find myself most delighted in beauty when things inside me feel ugly, when circumstances around me seem out of control and messy and I feel imbalanced. That’s when I need the nourishment that art provides. Photography, novels, films, and most importantly, poetry.
Poetry has become a faithful source of nourishment for me in my life. The life my wife and I lead is filled with chaos and predictably unpredictable behaviors from teenagers and our own children alike. It’s a lot to account for, a lot of emotion, a lot of mess. I often carry around a book of poetry with me, something I can flip open and get lost in thought with. I do this not as some sort of status thing, but because poetry is sustenance.
A lot of how I think about poetry was captured in short online TED segment with Ethan Hawke when he was talking about art and poetry and why it is so important. This is what he has to say about it:
“Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they’re not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until… their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you any more and all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and “has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?”
Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can’t even see straight … and that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s sustenance.”
There’s a line in Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer Manifesto where he says:
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Well, on Monday things were very chaotic in our home. If you considered all the facts, they were laughably so. And so I listened to Saint Berry, and I laughed. I imagined explaining out loud all that was happening at that moment, and just simply laughed. And in true sincerity, by the way. Truly laughing, with no glimmer of cynicism.
It ended up being a very long day. Even after my own kids were in bed, and the others in the home were getting to sleep, my wife was still at the police station dealing with two of our girls who had lots of stubborn and disrespectful behaviors. A friend called me for some help, their son had been rushed to the ER and was not doing well, struggling to breathe. We were unable to help in the moment and I felt so angry at my inability to help in the moment. My wife eventually got our girls home and to bed, and I was emotionally depleted by a long day.
I struggled to sleep that night. My dreams were filled with the anxieties of the day before, and I was really scared for my friend’s son. I was frustrated by the feeling of having to deal with kids being disrespectful and refusing our help when there was a family I care deeply about asking for it, wanting it.
I woke up more exhausted that morning than I was when I went to bed. I wasn’t hungry for breakfast, but I needed nourishment. I needed the morning air. I needed to feel the resonance of words and sounds and phrases to ring out from my bones.
I walked outside with my camera briefly as the kids were making their breakfasts. I snapped a few photos of the flowers along our walkway. I noticed a tree branch in our maple tree that was bent but not broken from last month’s storms, still growing. I saw that the front stretch of leaves on our property line, the ones that face the morning sun, had turned yellow. But just that little bit. These were all delights in and of themselves, and they were waiting, perhaps even crying out to me to be noticed, to be fulfilled (as Saint Mary Oliver says — like telling someone you love them).
And as I stood with my camera, words and phrases came to me as easily as noticing a certain bird’s song, or a cricket’s chirp, or the rhythms of the cicadas. I came in and wrote them down, and attached them to the photos I had just taken.
It was nothing spectacular or particularly marvelous, but definitely nourishing enough for breakfast.
Stepping Back 