A Willingness

I’ve felt for quite a while that poetry has left me. Not just that I haven’t written “actual poetry” for years, but that even the poetry of things and life and the everyday isn’t something I can conjure. I mean, I go through the motions, I know how it’s done, I know how to take a photo of something and make it look quite nice, and I know how to write proper sweet sentences, even if I refuse to at times. In Rome, I thought it might be coming back, that feeling that the poetry of the world is close. I continually read other people’s poetry, but it doesn’t pull me toward it as much as it once did. Not the fault of poets I don’t imagine. It might be putting it simply, but I think it has to do with politics. (Uh ya). Sure American politics, but it’s not that much better where I live.

Meanwhile, life is happening so fast and in all these different registers all the time. I know it’s like this for a lot of people, having to be so many people all at the same time. I’m writing this book and that book, and I’m working at the library which is a trickier place to be than you might imagine. I love my work and I love, honestly, those trickier aspects of it, but it’s a lot to hold. So you go from talking to people who live rough, and who are in precarious living arrangements, and who are so worried and afraid even, and who are having difficult times, and have lived through trauma I can’t even imagine living through, but when I return from my holiday, they still ask me how it was and genuinely want to know and listen and respond without any bitterness. One of them notices I’m wearing new shoes and says how much they like them.

Then I go back to my warm cozy home, and that feels weird. It just does. And then also, there are the roles of wife and mom and friend, etc etc. So many people going through so many things, right? And through all that the ever pervasive worry about art sales, and how the economy will affect us personally, which is relative to all the stories I hear of people with immediate and super scary concerns about their daily existence. I mean, probably we’ll be okay? We always have been, lord knows how sometimes, but here we are.

The thing is, I take strength and draw courage from the courage of those people I meet at the library. And I become more compassionate because of my co-workers who are this amazing group of caring and smart and wildly patient people that just give me so much faith in humanity every time I work with them.

So anyway, poetry. And where has it gone. Just before sitting down to write this, I saw the name of one of my favourite poets pop up in my newsfeed. Charles Wright. And so I read this article on LitHub by Mary Szybist. She quotes him on what he looks for in a poem by others:

“. . .[L]anguage that has a life of its own, seriousness of subject matter beyond the momentary gasp and glitter, a willingness to take on what’s difficult and beautiful, a willingness to be different and abstract, a willingness to put on the hair shirt and go into the desert and sit still, and listen hard, and write it down, and tell no one.”

I repeat: “a willingness to take on what’s difficult and beautiful…”

So this is life, this is poetry. This is what’s important.

Also, if you’ve not read Wright, you must, and there’s a collected/selected? not sure, out, titled Oblivion Banjo.

Poetry isn’t always in poems, as I know you know. I keep returning to an essay in Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison, titled “Layover Story” which was excerpted in Harper’s. In it she says,

“This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point—the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one…”

I repeat, “you have to keep living this willingness…”

And:

“Does graciousness mean you want to help—or that you don’t and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved. It does not require a good night’s sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory.”

Maybe, and I guess I know this and don’t know it all the time, is that library work is poetry. I’ve said it before and sometimes I believe it and sometimes I don’t. It’s just work. I’m not any better at it than anyone else there. We all just keep trying our best. We’re listening hard. We have a willingness.