Lately, I’ve been sitting by the shore of the Willamette River. There is one stretch where I can see river and highway adjacent to one another. The first time I was there, I thought how much the freeway of cars was really like a river of water. Recently, I’ve been noticing how the river flows in the opposite direction of the closest lanes of traffic.
As I have said before (“Art falls apart,” ODE, Aug. 7), I feel poetry stands in opposition to all that a culture based on domination, patriarchy, violence and authority would represent and propagate. In Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva’s book “Ecofeminism,” Mies writes: “What modern machine-man does to the earth will eventually be felt by all; everything is connected. ‘Unlimited Progress’ is a dangerous myth because it suggests that we can rape and destroy living nature, of which we are an integral part, without ourselves suffering the effects.”
Poetry, at its best, is an attempt to mend this disconnectedness between culture and nature; it contradicts both thoughtlessness and selfishness. To write it is to become a weaver, or seamstress, and to read it is to be placed in a space of limitless reflection. These two have a dynamic relationship, but I would like to emphasize the aspect of listening because our culture tends to emphasize the “telling” all too much.
Regardless of whether it’s a poem or not, consider this exercise: Try listening to something else — your friend, a stranger, an enemy, a tree — without forming any judgment or waiting for your turn to talk. This kind of waking meditation is actually quite difficult. You know why? Listening for the sake of itself isn’t a value that this culture cherishes. We’re inundated with sound bites, advertisements, headlines almost right from the womb. When it comes to education, the general attitude is “Give me the information and let me get out of here.”
I won’t go as far to blame the world’s problems on these examples — they are merely symptoms of a deeper-rooted disease. Still, there is no denying we are desensitized to patience and reflection as the result of them.
From my (albeit limited) experiences in the world of academic creative writing (a year in Kidd Tutorial and one advanced creative writing class), I have noticed a hesitance toward the idea of political poetry. In a way, this is justifiable, because I’m not sure if there’s a genre of poetry more prone to depersonalized and unfocused ranting. Here, the notion of “political” is tied up in broad, sweeping and arbitrary statements. Furthermore, such a poem doesn’t write from a place of experience; lack of experience lacks emotional resonance.
However, political poetry is also feared for the power it can elicit within the person. The personal is political, and the political is personal. This means content doesn’t necessarily have to be about some event, or object separate from the writer. A political poem written with focus and from a place of experience is devastatingly powerful and dangerous because it taps into something primal within us: our core. I don’t want to say this is our true self, because that makes it sound like something fixed. In his poem “Avocado,” Gary Snyder writes: “The great big round seed / In the middle, / Is your own Original Nature– / Pure and smooth, / Almost nobody ever splits it open / Or ever tries to see / If it will grow.” This is closer to an idea of a “core.”
I feel writers are especially prone to a fear of political poetry because it implicates a total connection between creator, creation and the world. Sylvia Plath likens herself to a mirror, silver and exact. Yet it goes farther when it comes to our core; the writer of a political poem places his or herself in a room full of mirrors, where they see themselves in everything. This is a place of intense reflection that many would rather turn away from.
I am weary of the ones who distance themselves from their work and deny its profound connection to life as a whole. This statement says nothing about what the content of what a poem should be, but rather what it should not. Poetry is not commodity. It cannot be left and returned to at the drop of a hat because the true poem never leaves us.
I overheard a conversation between folks about writer’s block the other day. It sounded like many other similar conversations I’ve heard about the subject, which talks about it as if were something that actually existed. But writer’s block only signals a greater congestion within a person, one that is disconnected and alienated from writing, or even worse, views it as “work” to be done. The true poet writes as she takes breaths of air. It is possible to write in the world without writing, just as it is possible to paint without painting. All it takes is a blossoming and opening up. Writing in this sense is almost an afterthought, an echo of experience.