Life in Public
In our series Life in Public, we ask our writers to examine how poetry speaks to different aspects of public experience. What does it mean to say that a poet is, as C. D. Wright has put it, “one with others”? What is poetry’s place in the public sphere today, of all times? How has life in that sphere been expressed in poems? Is all published poetry public speech? What is a private poem? What is occasional poetry? What is political poetry?
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
On October 13, at the celebration of Jim’s life and work, at the Stonington Free Library, Joanna Scott told the packed reading room that shortly after Jim started treatment for cancer he wrote to her that he hated the idea of bucket lists but he nevertheless had some everyday things he wanted to do: “Eat a little flat pizza. Get in the car. Take a shower without worrying. Enjoy the water … Have one martini … Feel on the other side of treatment. Read a book. Discover something in someone’s sentences that I haven’t before. Think out loud about what it is that I so love about sentences, about syntax, the simple beauty of grammar … Have dinner at the little bistro in Soho, just you and me …” I enthusiastically recommend James Longenbach’s posthumous book, Seafarer (published recently by W. W. Norton). In our precarious world, it is full of astonishing poems. I trust a few will last forever.
Catch Up on Issues of What Sparks Poetry
If you are writing a poem on the surface of the moon, you would likely have your back to the world, at least the back of your head: while you are absorbed in the poem on your desk, you are looking down, and the world is floating in the sky above you, as if its immensity were weightless. A blue balloon.
I am increasingly persuaded that American Christianity’s embrace of Donald Trump is simply the latest expression of a terrific counter-scandal, effectively another, much more gradual transvaluation of values, whereby the dominant American secular and religious visions have aligned themselves with a cult of progress, the technocratic human image for which power can only mean domination, exploitation, and mastery. The key joke of this era is the one where the man puts a gun to his head, and when his wife starts laughing says to her, “What’s so funny? You’re next!”
“—kept losing self control,” the first line of the poem, exposes one danger of being in public, the danger of losing control. But is it in our best interest, or even rational, to demonstrate control over ourselves, our emotions, in the face of fascism or environmental collapse? What is the use of self control, the poem asks, as the speaker’s persona fractures on the page.
Much of the poem’s brilliance resides in its house of mirrors tango with the present, with memory, and with the past. The stone wall is an entity unto itself—one whose intensity shifts with the light. The poem’s images float and cut: brushstrokes and wings, pale eyes, and lost arms—brutality and deliverance.
Like Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction, Sterling Brown’s poetry captures those “spiritual strivings,” the hurt and humor that continues to shape Black life. Brown’s poem draws from the Black Vernacular Tradition, reminiscent of his influences, Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Ma Rainey’s gravitational pull is the true subject of the poem. Brown catalogues, maps, and traces how multiple Black communities find a singularity through Rainey’s voice.
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.
