I would like to draw out an idea that wasn’t made explicit in my previous column (“Political poetry can bridge gap between personal, political,” ODE, Feb. 19). The idea was that writing can, and should be, a spiritual and life-affirming process.

This perspective, of course, is not easy to hold in the everyday world. At least not for me. The amount of tasks I subject myself to over the course of a given school/work week usually leaves me feeling like a thin coating of peanut butter spread over a piece of bread. There’s just not enough to go around. I’m sure others have felt the same way.
So how can spirituality permeate a world such as ours? I’ll be the first to admit it’s not always possible in an academic setting where time limitations, deadlines and term papers are a way of life. And I’ll speculate that it gets no better once we leave this shroud of academia and further subject ourselves to a capitalist job market.
But perhaps a good place to start would be with our poetry.
In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde says: “Poetry is not only dream or vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
The metaphor of the bridge is particularly apt because poetry seems to be about mending dualism such as “us versus them,” homosexual and heterosexual, friend and enemy, nature and culture, and so on. As the highest branches of a tree seem to embrace the sky, so can poetry melt the divisions that exist between people and their heretofore “separate” environment.
The birth of the political, then, is rooted in poetry.
“It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,” Lorde said. “(First) made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
Many would shy away from this action. Despite its vague meaning, in the context of this particular society, true action is when we begin to distinguish who we are from a society that increasingly values thoughtless visual captivation, fear, conformity and domination.
Persian poet Rumi (1207-1273) wrote: “Be melting snow / Wash yourself of yourself. / A white flower grows in the quietness. / Let your tongue become that flower.” Here is that melting of the subject into object. It need not be some juggernaut of change. It’s really quite simple.
At this point it is important to emphasize that while poetry is commonly considered a genre, or form of writing, Lorde wants to move beyond that interpretation. In her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde reclaims the term from its common, plasticized definition and says that the erotic is true knowledge, a true understanding “which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.”
While this could easily be taken out of context, Lorde says that once we have experienced a fullness and depth of feeling, we go “beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our
society.” The strength of the erotic, then, equates with true empowerment. True empowerment equates with poetry. There is no distinction between the terms; they are one.
Now, I’ve gone this far using the s(pirutality)-word without really defining it. Well, this may either further complicate things, or perhaps simplify them, but the spiritual is inherently empty. Not empty of meaning, but empty of form.
In another poem, Rumi writes: “every craftsman / searches for what’s not there / to practice his craft… Workers rush toward some hint / of emptiness, which they then / start to fill. Their hope, though, / is for emptiness, so don’t think you must avoid it. It / contains what you need.”
Written poems illustrate this sense of emptiness. What’s left out, in the form of line break and negative space — takes on the same importance as what’s there, if not more. We need only consider short poems, or forms like haiku, which have endured for years because of their resonance of meaning.
If Lorde believes that the erotic is poetry not only written, but poetry lived, then spirituality does not have one definition. It is anything that empowers and brings us together. In peace and recognition of life. In listening and in understanding. It is not judgment. It is ours to find within and claim, and it is not to be experienced second-hand.
In conclusion: There is no conclusion. Which is somewhat appropriate for such a topic. I will say I’m retiring this column for now. The next logical step is to stop writing about this stuff and take it to the streets.