I guess an interesting question, not answerable in brief, is how does a regular person become a poet? Where does she acquire the platform or stance or calling that enables her to speak, and how does her assuming the platform affect her community, state, or nation? In that question alone are many subsidiary questions, several times more questions than there are poets, and even more answers. But one question can serve as an axis to wind some thoughts around.
What happens when a citizen takes exception to something? She defines herself in some degree away from an image of herself or her world agreed on by the community as the proper image. For example, a mother could take exception to the mother image society identifies her by. She could protest that the image, unacknowledged and automatic, is a form of tyranny not arising from nature, as it may sometimes seem, but a definition and imposition arrived at by the dynamics of the culture. The mother surprises in herself much energy not expressed by the mother image: she may want to serve others but not always serve others; she may be interested in carpentry or in business administration; she may wish to think of herself as a human equal, having access to equal rights and equal pay.
The part of her potential nature that society’s imposed image excludes from her own definition of herself becomes the exception she takes, the break, the halt, the inward hesitation that must erupt into speech. This is the platform, I think. This is the vocation, the calling. And this is where what poets say begins a complicated relationship with what societies are. The poet from the humble separation of her platform declares a difference with society, a difference brought on by an overlooked wrong to the fullest possibility of her nature. Society, operating most smoothly when most homogeneous, resents the disturbance of a difference and marginalizes the poet, attempting to re-right itself by stamping out the difference. But the poet knows that growth and change tremble in and out of focus where lives are on the line, the poet’s lines themselves cutting out a difference on the page that imitates the introduction of the difference into the world. If the announced difference stirs, redefines, completes others, a tendency develops in the society that may sweep away into a new time.
The poet finds some part of her identity excluded from becoming operational in society. She notes that exclusion in herself, takes exception to thinking of herself in that way, mounts the platform of the exception, and administers the disturbances, the painful rifts of context that may eventually bring better things.
But helpful, necessary as it is for poets to sense shifts in tone and meaning in their worlds, to call attention to them and take exception to them, it is essential for larger purposes that the poet do all this with astonishing competence, with visionary authority. If the poet only notes and cures ills in her own time, she is locked in that time (or space or region) and becomes irrelevant as soon as the issue she has addressed is no longer an issue. But if the making of the poem, the coordination of word, image, rhythm is deeply moving, if the landscape of the mind presented is overwhelmingly enchanting, the poem takes on a value in itself, just as a basketball game beautifully played is meaningful beyond winning and losing, though winning and losing, as in wars and as any Southerner knows, is extremely important.
The chief point I want to make has to do with the energies poets feel and cause with their local concerns and what can happen more broadly because of those energies. Local, regional concerns may bring poets to life as they address wrongs and rights, but if a poet happens also to address the wrongs and rights with commanding beauty, she becomes of interest not only to her own community and region but to the whole country and, conceivably, to the whole world.
I’ve tried to draw a big curve, meanwhile protesting that it’s impossible to draw such curves justly and quickly. The poet takes exception to the way things are. The difference she notes becomes her minority platform. The minority status, the lack of endorsement, of the platform presses anger and risk into the arrogance of speech. The speech finds resonance, or doesn’t, in the society, and the poet witnessing agreeable change gratefully accepts the honors society gratefully bestows on her. But if the speech was beautiful, many other causes and countries will be attracted in order to praise what was beautifully achieved.
So many poems in the anthology following present the liveliness I have been trying to name. In Lenard Moore’s poem, the unfamiliar keeps arising within the familiar; the will to rebellion is quietly represented in Helen Goodman’s “Edenton Tea Party”; I am deeply touched by the exactness of place, the love and rage of Elizabeth Bolton’s poem; the graphic realism of Shelby Stephenson’s language releases us from the temptations of sentimentality; Lu Overton, Evolyn Rinehart, Mary Kratt, and so many others bring the perceptions and feelings of poets to the rest of us, so much so as to tell us that North Carolina is a homeland of its own where the language is used in a way to interest everybody.
From the Introduction to North Carolina’s 400 Years: Signs Along the Way, edited by Ronald H. Bayes {Durham, N.C.: Acorn Press, 1986), vii—viii.