What Sparks Poetry

Living as I do, phone pressed against my body most of the day, it’s strange to me how tragedy, especially, can feel farther and farther away. It’s so easy to vacillate between feeling overly affected and totally numb. How, I keep wondering, did Louise Glück write a poem inside and outside of the massiveness of 9/11, a poem that migrates, necessarily, between the body and the mind, a poem moved by unanswerable questions, in which repetition is as likely to halt as it is to heal?

These days it seems the state will remember almost nothing outside of the oft-told stories that justify its continued rule; it calls upon its powerful, vast, and highly detailed memory mostly to reinforce narratives that continue to consolidate and reify its own power. And yet, as Natalie Harkin’s Archival Poetics powerfully reminds us, the mind of the state can be made to remember what it’s strategically chosen to forget. 

The courage to write of death, let alone the passing of a sister whose life, language, and world were so intimately connected, who shared one’s own name, awes me. In Sister Urn, Rexilius swan dives into the wound, into her loss, articulating grief with such intimacy that it wounds and this wound becomes the very breach allowing for communion.

[O]nce a poem is out in the world, there’s no way to predict the different uses, appropriations, misappropriations, readings and anti-readings to which it might be put, nor the places and times where it might emerge, uncanny, as if with fresh meaning. 

One of the secrets of public life is that, despite the public record, people of color were indeed out and about. In public. They were at the parties, asking questions (“What is the occasion?”), watching, listening, immersed in spring and the quandary that is American freedom. Remarkably, “In Memoriam” exposes this secret.

The poem never seems to settle the matter of poetry’s reach in public life; what animates the lyric is the energy of the discrepancy between the outer world of public realities and the inner world of thought and feeling.

This is the method of Zong!—to see and to hear; to allow silence to exist, and grief; and to persist. Persisting, for Philip, meant seeking freedom within limitation by, as she puts it, locking herself in the text. Our job as readers is to feel that claustrophobia, and find our light within it, not passing too quickly through language and its discomforts. 

Poetry does important work and that work has a bearing on real life, but I’ve often been stymied by the question of how poems can effect material change in a world that is, generally, not especially interested in what poetry or poets have to say.

Before the first Earth Day, way back in 1967, Merwin was speaking for animals and for biodiversity... Now as we live into the age of the Anthropocene, more and more likely to be the last age to be given a name, his warning is no less grave. Was he heard then?  Is he heard now? Perhaps not widely, but how much does that matter?

In a 1987 interview that appeared in the Partisan Review, the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said, “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” With that metaphor, we are asked to see poetry as a gauge, a measure, a tool, a way of understanding the nature of phenomenon.

Poets Shehzar Doja and James Byrne came to Cox’s Bazaar for the first creative writing group ever facilitated in the camps. According to Byrne: “Shehzar and I quickly realized that the attendees weren’t just making history by being part of the poetry sessions, they wanted to mark history.”

When I found harris's poem, I saw myself, I saw the midwest I knew, I saw my own disregard for the interiority of others, I saw my own sloppiness.

After a long hiatus from school, I was working on a Master’s in literature, and just beginning to write poems of my own, when I first read Marilyn Chin’s Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. This book, with its densely allusive fabric, hyper-vivid imagery, and wild formal range, opened up my idea of what poetry can do.

Hass begins to doubt that language should precipitate loss, or that loss alone informs our linguistic impulses. What about the memory and feeling that never leave? The private history of a word that remains, remaking us and that word?

This poem’s genius lies in its sharp, patient storytelling; deft vernacular; its indisputable dignity and lack of judgment rendering the sistuh; and its collective consciousness.