We need to recall the elemental importance and urgency of poetry, the subtle nurture and the profound grace it allows in our otherwise rudimentary and often punishing lives. And, as Christina says, we need to remember how lucky we all are to able to do what we do, to bring to language -- the language of our poems -- the complexities of thought and passion, the tastes of words, and the rhythmic verbal seductions of ideas and hopes. I know, a little rapturous, but deal with it.
Since I began teaching more than thiry years ago, an identical event has happend to me each year, often two or three times in any given year. What happens is this: someone who has called from the outside, meaning outside whatever school I am teaching at (this has happened to me at Oberlin College, The Johns Hopkins University, and at USC, where I presently teach), has been routed to me because they have a poetry question, and I am the poet at hand. The person asks me to help them try to locate a particular poem they once read in high school or an early survey class in college, often many years ago.These are not people who normally read poetry, or even much literature at all, it often seems. They don't know the author or the title of the poem, but they tell me what they do remember and, because anthologies tend to replicate themselves like space aliens, I can often tell them exactly the poem they are looking for.
After this happened half a dozen times to me during my first year at Oberlin, I began asking the callers why they were looking for their particular poem, and the answer was always the same. They had recently lost someone close to them -- a parent, a sibling, a daughter, a son -- and they felt they needed to find this poem, this particular poem that they rememebered from their past, often from a time deep in their past. Now, it's important to remember that these poems that they were looking for often had nothing to do with death. Yet in every case the callers had this memory of having had a profound connection with a particular poem, with the way the power and the language of the poem reflected for them some exceptional experience, or emotion, or illumination within them.
What became clear to me was that these callers all recognized that, at that present moment when they were calling me, they had no language that was commensurate with their own grief, no words with which to express not only to others but also to themselves the dimensions of their own loss and suffering. They semed to believe that if they could only read again this one particular poem that had so touched them, that had released in them such powerful connections years before, that perhaps now they might once again be able to connect some words, some language to the riot of grieving they were experiencing. I don't even think this was a truly conscious recognition of this fact; I always feel (and it continues to happen to me) that these callers are intuitively seeking out what must be for many of them one of the few times that they had been able to see and feel language forged against experience.
It is at times like those, talking to those callers, that I remember what a lucky thing it is to be a poet. It is something we need to remind each other, as Christina reminded me today, as well as ourselves.
(ed note: this post first appeared here on May 9, 2009 -- sdh)