Poetry can occur anywhere there are words, even in daily life.
IAIN MCGILCHRIST
Poetry in daily life may seem an extravagant thought, as if “poetry” and “daily life” are somehow opposed to each other, difficult to reconcile—as if we have another life in which to find poetry. Poets themselves have brought up such a division—for example, Yeats, who famously described the necessity of choosing between the “life” and the “work.” Anyone can see that you don’t have one without the other, yet there’s a noble and appealingly romantic sense that poetry is something elevated, that it’s aloof, floating on extended wings above the quotidian: that life has one kind of reality, and poetry another. Is it so? When I talk to people about poetry, which I do all the time, I often hear things like “Oh, I read some poetry in school, even wrote a bit of it, but I don’t have time for it now.” I’ll be unhesitatingly told that poetry today is written so that nobody can understand it, except maybe other poets. And in the media, where poetry itself is scarcely encountered day to day, one repeatedly and unavoidably encounters fervid articles that ask outright, “Is poetry dead?” or worse, “Is poetry irrelevant?” So much for Ezra Pound’s saying that poetry is news that stays news!
The quotation I take as my epigraph comes from a “View” written by a psychiatrist, whose daily professional life involves understanding the kinds of connections people make. Like poets, psychiatrists are interested in deep perception and, ultimately, metaphors. As McGilchrist wrote elsewhere in Poetry’s pages, “For me everything depends on the reciprocal relationship between our minds and the relatively independent world beyond them.” There: the connection between poetry and daily life. I suppose many people imagine poets to be on the crazier end of the sanity spectrum, and perhaps many are. Yet it is possible, indeed necessary, for a therapist like McGilchrist to read poems the way he reads patients; talking about the Philip Larkin poem “Coming,” he writes, “Here the intimations of recovery and forgiveness, coming out of suffering and desolation, and also of a deep bareness out of which something unimaginably rich is to come—for a while—are subtle and complex.”
The tension between life and what can be imagined is creative, and it’s necessary. As Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says, putting it more intimately, “I have found a kind of solace in poetry that I cannot find elsewhere.”
People seek solace all their lives, but poetry often addresses things seemingly more mundane than that—for instance, the seeking of wealth. Money, after all, is a kind of metaphor, and one that everybody understands well. “I’m an economist. Yet poetry is my first stop on the way to invention—discovery of metaphors,” wrote Stephen T. Ziliak in his “View.” For Ziliak, poetry is all about economy, in the sense of efficiency: think haiku, with a budget of three lines. He considers, in his piece, the “dominant metaphor” of economics, the “invisible hand,” and asks whether poets can help the economy—a good, and seldom asked, question.
The work of the invisible hand is traceable not only in economics but in our own health. When the philosopher Richard Rorty was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, his family gathered around him.
My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. . . . “Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.”
Rorty’s conclusion: “I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse.” Rorty is not alone in wishing so. The late film critic Roger Ebert, in one of his last published pieces, shows how all through his life poems “simply found a place for themselves, and they stayed.”
As you’ll see in this book, other kinds of labor connect deeply and fruitfully with poetry. Josh Warn worked for twenty-nine years as an ironworker. As he points out, “Ironwork is often artful enough, if not arty, and there are reasons that carrying longish poems in memory has some of the same satisfactions as completing a difficult weld or fitting a steel handrail to a curved stair.”
Lieutenant General William James Lennox Jr. served as the fifty-sixth superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He observes that, “like warfare, poetry can result from the collision between romance and reality.” Note that here an opposition between “real life” and the imagination is fatal. Poetry is taught at West Point, and when PBS anchor Jeffrey Brown visited a classroom there, as he describes in his piece in this book, he affirmed that “discussions of the role of poetry in our society can feel irrelevant or abstract. Not in [a] West Point classroom.”
But how did these views come to be published in Poetry? Christian Wiman, who was its editor for a decade, and who has likely spent more time with poetry than anyone else alive, expressed the concern that “poets often spend their entire poetic lives around universities, [and] the whole enterprise seems to have high walls around it. Poets determine what gets published. Poets review other poets. Poets give each other prizes.” Those sentences appeared in Poetry’s January 2005 issue by way of introducing a new feature called The View from Here. Only the view wasn’t, as that title might seem to imply, going to be the view from the editor’s chair.
Wiman devised a feature of the magazine—ingeniously stewarded by Poetry’s Fred Sasaki and from which all these “Views” are taken—that would serve as an ongoing riposte to the charges against poetry and open up the landscape by enlisting writers from outside the poetry world to write about it.1 In fact, what Wiman said a decade ago remains strikingly true: poetry has indeed become professionalized in this country. The critic Mark McGurl claims in his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing that the MFA has been the single greatest influence on American literature since World War II, noting, as the New York Times put it, that “most serious writers since then have come out of graduate-school incubators.” A similar career track is rapidly being followed in the United Kingdom. Note that this is a career path, not a road to success. You don’t need a degree to write, of course, and having one guarantees nothing, not even a job. What seems clear despite all this is that people from walks of life outside the profession of poetry are, as Wiman pointedly observed, “perfectly qualified to judge anything now being written. And what seems even clearer is that, if you’re a poet writing today, these are the readers you want.”
· · ·
As I’ve already suggested, a number of these readers are included in this collection: doctors, professors, journalists, politicians. As you would expect, musicians and actors can be deeply affected by poetry. “My mother was a poem written by Gwendolyn Brooks,” as Grammy and Academy Award–winner Rhymefest boldly puts it in his view. The actress Lili Taylor says, “Poetry has helped me become more versed, so to speak, in the language of emotion.” When it comes to writers, even novelists need poetry. Pinkaj Mishra wrote that he reads it “for the same reason I read prose fiction: for a brief escape into a reality more comforting than the one I lived in.”
Music, movies, and novels all provide escape, and so too do sports. Poetry and athletics have gone hand in hand since antiquity, from Pindar’s odes to the present day, when Kobe Bryant announced his retirement in verse. And as Major League Baseball player Fernando Perez writes, “Like poetry, baseball is a kind of counterculture.” In this sense poetry isn’t in any sort of opposition to life but runs counter to it (a fine distinction).
Even politicians, whose mantra lately is that “you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose,” turn to poetry.
This suggests that poetry has a beneficial effect. It may well have, but more than anything, poetry is a pleasure. In each of the pieces in this book, you’ll notice that, different as each writer is from the others, they all have one thing in common: they take enormous pleasure in poetry. How can this be?
I’d say that the best answer might be found in the artist Ai Weiwei’s “View”: “To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.” This describes something pleasurable and wonderful, but also vast. I suspect that vastness goes a long way toward explaining why people might have some trouble, at first, with poetry. Neko Case goes so far as to tremble before the muse: “I guess I just need permission to be in the same room with poetry.” But poetry is in the same room with us, whether we know it or not, as the pages that follow show. In these brief essays people from all walks of life will keep you in superb company as you work out your own views of poetry, and suggest the many ways poetry accompanies us in daily life and in our own work.
Don Share