However well the poet bears the unclear word within themselves, they are dedicated to precision. To arrive without fully knowing one’s function in language, but utter faith in it nonetheless.
An episode riffing off a lecture to some education retirees the other day & the function of the poet in the world. The Laureates out there. What do they do. Saying hello to the Retirees of the educational system, thinking a lot about what it means to have given over one’s knowledge for a lifetime, and then ended that. I was thinking about the function of the poet in our world, and what my function is as the Vermont poet laureate. In truth, I only want to write more poems, and about poetry, and to then arrive in these places and give them a voice. the question of how poetry means, how it takes time to “understand” it, how it happens to us when we hear it, and how we are frustrated, frightened, intrigued, sentimental, excited and wary of it—are all indications that poetry, and poems, are like humans themselves—and the strange way that poems unfold in language get at something deeper within the human being. The way language coaxes out something that helps us live more fully in our lives, and brings us back into right relation with ourselves and one another. It is normal to not like poetry. To not “understand” it—any more than we really understand one another, even the people we love the most.
Wild Asters
by Ruth Stone
I am here to worship the blue
Asters along the brook,
Not to carry pollen on my legs
Or rub strutted wings in mindless
sucking
But to feel with my eyes
The loss of you and me,
Not in the powdered mildew
That spreads from leaf to leaf
But in the glorious absence of grief
To see what was not meant to be seen:
The clusters, the aggregate,
The undenying multiplicity.
In some ways I think poetry is like prayer in that it is filled with silence and address to the unseen. In some ways I think poetry gets to a space beyond ourselves. And that we need to have these kind of sacred moments with the unseen in order to face the reality of this world itself. Poetry will always be harder to touch because this is a hard threshold to stand upon, let alone cross. It is also a place of grief. Because there’s so much we don’t’ understand about being in this world, and where we go when we “leave it,” – the poet deals in thresholds where we’re poised on moments that need to get “beyond words,” Wordsworth called them “fallings from us, vanishings”— the writer Allen Williamson calls them moments “When an eruption of our inner life takes us out of the shared social world, partly because that would has no terms by which to acknowledge such moments. Poetry can do pioneer work at the margins of the sayable, where the genres that belong entirely to communal experience—the sermon, the political tract, the popular song, and even storytelling insofar as it derives from the group in the tavern or around the village well—are not allowed to go.”