Poetry Club – Soul Food
How to inspire folks to read poetry? (Well, how to inspire anyone to read/do anything :) ) And I think the key word there is obviously inspire. When you can lead someone to poetry, to a single poem, and maybe even to a line of poetry, if it resonates, they will remember it. I once read a poem at a staff meeting from the book, Soul Food, and whenever I see this one person who was moved by it, he mentions it, quotes from it. I think the words by Blaise Pascal (by way of John O’Donohue’s book, Beauty) are instructive:
“In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.”
I refer to Soul Food often, and in fact, recently read a poem I love from the anthology. (Which honestly, I wanted to try and do something outside my comfort zone on Ig but I don’t love it and might take it down lol so watch quickly). There are so many poems that I carry in my mind and which happen to be in Soul Food. I love how, for example there is a poem titled “Anger” by Cèsar Vallejo on one page on the other side is “Hope” by Edith Södergran on the other. (Translated from the Spanish and Finland Swedish respectively). Such a thoughtful placement and also, helpful, at least for me these days, as I swing between anger and hope.
I recently picked up The Poetry Pharmacy by William Sieghart at my local indy, Audreys. It immediately brought to mind Canada’s beloved Ronna Bloom and her Rx for Poetry. In the intro to this anthology, Sieghart says, “I’ve always believed in the power of poetry to explain people to themselves.” There is a solace to be found in poetry, which has to do with a “problem shared.” And, he says, “more than that, very often, it is transformed: the poet has made what you’re going through seem more intriguing, more timeless, and more valid in some way, and that can be a great comfort. The distance afforded by seeing one’s own emotions formalized and made beautiful combines with the visceral connection one feels with this poet, this stranger, who understands, and what results is a sort of peace.”
The poem I’ll share from the collection is this one:
The Way It Is
by William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
I own the book the Stafford poem is from and have read it often through the years. I didn’t think I’d be gleaning anything new by Sieghart’s take, but I was wrong. “The implied question at the heart” of the poem, he says, is simply, “What is your thread?” And Sieghart says that “intuitively…I felt that I knew what mine was — and yet if you asked me to explain it, I would have nothing to say.” There was also something comforting in reading about how someone else approaches a poem, connects to it, and this anthology gives the reader this other layer of solace.
I was drawn to Franny Choi’s book by its title, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. Again, I browsed this on the shelves at Audreys and after reading the title poem in the bookstore, I knew it was for me. I’m not done thinking about all the apocalypses. And I want to know more about how others experienced and felt and were affected by the pandemic. We all experienced something of the same, but also not. The poem titled, “Catastrophe is Next to Godliness,” begins,
“Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.”
Another poem, “Disaster begins “Without a Star”” begins, “Sixty-six million years after the end of the world, I click purchase / on an emergency go-bag from Amazon.”
I love anthologies of poems, but reading a single work by a poet whose voice carries through an entire collection with such assurance and skill about our current moment is a breathtaking thing. Highly recommend.
The next book is What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer which came out in 2020. (Seems a million years ago now). The voice is what critics will call “accessible” like it’s an insult, but it’s full of quiet and persistent and strong lines. I loved this poem:
Interview with Self
by Kate Baer
Can I have it all?
No.
Can I have it all?
No.
Can I have it all?
No.
So until writing this, I didn’t know that Baer is known as an “Instagram Poet.” (Probably another way we like to insult poets, women poets, etc. Me, I like all sorts of poetry. The big theoretical deep allusive stuff and the sort of quick visceral sharp new stuff. It all helps, it all speaks to each other if you let it. In “Advice for Former Selves” Baer says, “Burn your speeches, your instructions, / your prophecies too. In the morning when / you wake : stretch. Do not complain. Do not / set sail on someone else’s becoming…” And in the same poem she advises herself to “not look down your nose..” In another poem, she says, “What I meant when I said “I don’t have time” is that / every minute that passes I’m disappointing someone.”
The poems are relatable, and fun and refreshing, but they also hit notes of despair, too. In, “Fear of Happiness” the first line is, “Sometimes I wonder how fast we could pack the car in the event of the world ending.”
Lastly, a book I’ve spent quite a bit of time with is Franz Wright’s God’s Silence. It came to me, flying off my very own bookshelf at a time when I was feeling dark and I let it take me with some comedic awareness into a slightly darker place. This felt good, strangely. And that’s perhaps the power of poetry. I haven’t dogeared a book of poetry quite this extensively in some time, which says something. A lot of underlining. So I’ll share some of those enviable lines:
“I was always the death of the party.”
“I’m still alone with all the world’s / beauty and cruelty.”
“If I could stop talking, completely
cease talking for a year, I might begin
to get well”
“And every day I’ll try
to do one thing I like,
in memory of being happy.”
“There are happinesses gone forever”
“And I think I’m beginning to learn finally
what everything has been trying to teach me”
He speaks of translating “my heart for you / from the original / silence”
There are as many poetries as there are poets, but if I could write poetry again, I’d try for this kind.
Some thoughts by Franz Wright on Image magazine:
“I perceive the world in terms of language, as I think any real writer does. From the time I was a kid, even just through reading, I felt that it was like having two lives, like living twice, as some Japanese poet put it. I had the good fortune to have this second infinity, this second universe, inside of me, which I carried around with me. It’s like being in love, like having a wonderful secret. It makes the world radiant. I needed something to make things alive. I found that in my love of poetry. Not just writing it, but in the love of poetry itself. I always thought of writing poetry as an attempt to be part of that company of people who made this reality possible in the world.
I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you’re very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you’re trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself. It still makes me uncomfortable to call myself a poet. I think of myself as someone in the service of poetry. If I happen to be in that blessed state of consciousness where I am able to write, I guess at that moment I’m a poet.”
Although I’m glad to have written everything that I have, very glad, I wish I hadn’t stopped writing poetry because it’s a muscle unto itself. A purity. A way of seeing and being in the world that I think is preferable, for the most part. Poetry left me, or I was ejected from it? at some point, though one day, I like to think I’ll return, it will return. (Can I have it all? No.)
Beautiful poetry is often about terrible or difficult things. It’s the precision that is beautiful, the in-spite-of-it-ness that’s beautiful. It’s the light all around a poem, the radiance, that seeps from even a monster of a poem. How do people live without poetry? I wouldn’t like to.
