What Has Poetry Done for You?
You jot down your ideas for poems on pieces of scrap paper and then put them aside until you can work on them. If you had to average the amount of time you spend writing poems, it probably adds up to about one to two hours a week. You have a regimented style of living and you use a rotating list of "Things to Do" to keep yourself on track. Currently, "Writing Poetry" is in between "Study Spanish" and "Take a Walk." How much time to devote to each activity is always problematic. Should you take a walk for an hour? Two hours? How about a day-long hike? Poetry is no different and you have always wrestled with how much time to give it. Possibilities have ranged from 1-2 hours per week to 7-8 hours(read full-time job) per day. You never got up to 7-8 hours per day. Even 1-2 hours per week was and is sometimes difficult. In your youth, you admit to entertaining yourself with notions of fame. Now that you are in your 60s, the dream of writing poems for high-paying publishing houses and a salivating public has been supplanted by a thoroughly mundane and realistic outlook. You still think you’re good, so you protect your ego by studying men like Du-Fu, a poet whose brilliance was recognized after his death. Ahh, hope springs eternal. So you plod along, producing a poem every now and again. An activity should be beneficial, however, so occasionally there is a reckoning. How much time should you devote to poetry? Should you devote any time at all to it? After all, there are other activities in your rotating list of “Things to Do.” Why should you waste your time writing poetry? What has it done for you?
Years ago, you volunteered for a scientific dig in the mountains of Utah. You were looking for evidence of mammoths and early hunters in the Manti La-Sal National Forest in Utah. In your poem “Event in Utah,” you recreate a scene that might have happened 10,000 years ago in those mountains. It involves the passage of a boy into manhood. A multitude of emotions drove the writing of that poem – awe, wonder, respect, amazement, humility. You had to take these emotions and examine why participating on a dig was causing them. Why, for example, did you feel awe as you held an arrowhead? The act of finding the origin of these emotions was really an exercise in finding your identity. In the case of the arrowhead, the origin of the emotions lay in the power of the arrowhead to transmit the history of man from our days of stone and hunting and gathering all the way down to you, with your gasoline powered car, cell phone, and apartment complex. Your identity was wrapped up in the history of that arrowhead, and the finished poem became a realization and expression of that identity.
But really, shouldn’t you just get over yourself? A friend of yours once dismissed the idea of going to Machu Pichu out of hand, asking "Why would I want to go see a bunch of ruins?" Then, looking at an abandoned building nearby, he pointed to it and added, "Look, there are some ruins. Why on earth would I want to go there?" Perhaps identity is overrated. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with history. Like your friend, like Emerson, perhaps you should be a “seeker with no past” at your back. Perhaps it is better, for example, to just look at the moon for a second and say, “Gee, the moon looks nice tonight” and then go inside and watch TV, rather than staring at it for ten minutes and asking, “Why am I drawn to the moon? Where does this feeling come from?” and then writing a poem to try to find out where that feeling is coming from. Why experience life on poetry? Why can’t you just surrender yourself to experience… to simply experience something?
Many go through life experiencing many feelings but never engaging their intellect to find the origin of those feelings. Should you be one of these people? Is this process of introspection and discovery something you can just shut off, or is it an aspect of you that is permanent? If it is something you cannot shut off, is it possible to obtain it elsewhere at a lower cost? At times, it does feel like rather than living, you are writing poetry. You drive the streets of Boston and look at the buildings and the streets, so full of history, and words start stringing themselves together in your mind. And so it is that you sometimes think you should try to stop the words from coming... to survive without poetry, to experience life “straight.” What's so special about old streets and buildings?
Years ago, you volunteered for a scientific dig in the mountains of Utah. You were looking for evidence of mammoths and early hunters in the Manti La-Sal National Forest in Utah. In your poem “Event in Utah,” you recreate a scene that might have happened 10,000 years ago in those mountains. It involves the passage of a boy into manhood. A multitude of emotions drove the writing of that poem – awe, wonder, respect, amazement, humility. You had to take these emotions and examine why participating on a dig was causing them. Why, for example, did you feel awe as you held an arrowhead? The act of finding the origin of these emotions was really an exercise in finding your identity. In the case of the arrowhead, the origin of the emotions lay in the power of the arrowhead to transmit the history of man from our days of stone and hunting and gathering all the way down to you, with your gasoline powered car, cell phone, and apartment complex. Your identity was wrapped up in the history of that arrowhead, and the finished poem became a realization and expression of that identity.
But really, shouldn’t you just get over yourself? A friend of yours once dismissed the idea of going to Machu Pichu out of hand, asking "Why would I want to go see a bunch of ruins?" Then, looking at an abandoned building nearby, he pointed to it and added, "Look, there are some ruins. Why on earth would I want to go there?" Perhaps identity is overrated. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with history. Like your friend, like Emerson, perhaps you should be a “seeker with no past” at your back. Perhaps it is better, for example, to just look at the moon for a second and say, “Gee, the moon looks nice tonight” and then go inside and watch TV, rather than staring at it for ten minutes and asking, “Why am I drawn to the moon? Where does this feeling come from?” and then writing a poem to try to find out where that feeling is coming from. Why experience life on poetry? Why can’t you just surrender yourself to experience… to simply experience something?
Many go through life experiencing many feelings but never engaging their intellect to find the origin of those feelings. Should you be one of these people? Is this process of introspection and discovery something you can just shut off, or is it an aspect of you that is permanent? If it is something you cannot shut off, is it possible to obtain it elsewhere at a lower cost? At times, it does feel like rather than living, you are writing poetry. You drive the streets of Boston and look at the buildings and the streets, so full of history, and words start stringing themselves together in your mind. And so it is that you sometimes think you should try to stop the words from coming... to survive without poetry, to experience life “straight.” What's so special about old streets and buildings?