The Mission of the Poem

 Introduction:

The mission of the poem is to move the soul, either the soul of the poet or the reader from a consideration of the superficial and trivial toward the center of truth and solemnity. Each art form does the same thing in its way, but the way of the poem is through rhythm, image, metaphor, story, and precise and harmonious language. The poem is built of words, but it points to a particular kind of truth beyond its words, a truth for which no words, not even the words of the poem, will suffice.

To put it another way, the work of the poem is to somehow make a net of words set to capture some bit of living truth. If the poet can write it true and we can read it well, that net of words takes us into an appreciation of that truth even if we cannot ourselves speak that truth back to the poet in words. Not even the words of another poem. That might come close, but it still will have captured a different truth, the truth of a different poem, in a different moment. That is why no summary of a poem can ever give us more than a hint of the power of the poem itself and no one writing about a poem, as I am here, can hope to say in writing about it what the poem says or do what the poem does. It cannot tell the truth the poem tells.

To put it yet another way, the poem is a window to the truth. It is not the truth, but a window into the enormity of the truth. As I lift my eye from this page, my particular, non-metaphorical window gives me a view of the yellowing leaves of a magnolia that was split in a recent storm and, beyond that, a bank of white clouds. In the middle of the cloud bank is a patch of blue that, I know, extends far off into the atmosphere and beyond. I am telling you what I literally see, but hints of metaphor and symbol flutter through my words. If I could write what I see into a poem and write it well, I will have created a window of a different sort.

The vision through my window is not the world; it is a piece of the world that, like Blake’s grain of sand, gives me a hint of the vastness and changeability of the world.

Without such a window, we remain shut up within the walls of our own particularity and triviality. The mission of the poem is to trick us out from behind our walls, to open our eyes to what is beyond the window.

To take an example, Blake’s “London” is a very different window from the one in my room, one which looks out on a very different scene.

    I wander thro' each charter'd street, 

    Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. 

    And mark in every face I meet 

    Marks of weakness, marks of woe. 

    In every cry of every Man, 

    In every Infants cry of fear, 

    In every voice: in every ban, 

    The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

    How the Chimney-sweepers cry 

    Every blackning Church appalls, 

    And the hapless Soldiers sigh 

    Runs in blood down Palace walls 

    But most thro' midnight streets I hear 

    How the youthful Harlots curse 

    Blasts the new-born Infants tear 

    And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse 

In the poem, the poet becomes a sort of walking window as he wanders the chartered streets of the city. If the notion of a walking window is too disturbing (I can see Blake on his journey through the streets, banging his window frame against the market stalls and weaving it through the crowds), let’s assume we have been invited into the skull of the poet and that we are invited to see through his eyes (those windows) and hear through his ears. What do we see? What do we hear? We see and hear the sighs, the manacles, the blood of the hapless soldier, the blackning church, the blighted marriage hearse, all very swiftly envisioned and enacted in the language of the poem. From that poem, we can extract a great deal of the poet’s thinking about the city and society. We can summarize that thinking in very simple terms and not be wrong: Things are bad in London. People suffer. The state and the church exploit. Prostitution taints the family.

            And yet there is so much more to the poem. It operates in so many more dimensions, literal and visionary, social and spiritual, medical and metaphorical. It is possible to find that, if we read it well, the poem opens more for the reader with each reading.

This is because the power of the poem ---and that of any true poem--- is not in what it says, but in what it does.

What it does is move the reader.

*

We hear a sermon or a political speech, and if these were well done, we say, It was moving or I was moved. If a decision comes to us, we say I was moved to do this thing. We speak as if we are under the action of the thing which has moved us. Yet we bring all sorts of personal action to this movement; we could, after all, resist the pull of the things which would move us. We are not merely passive under the spell of the speech or sermon; it is our willingness to be moved together with the power of that which is moving us that effects the action. Where does this movement take us? We move to a different psychic space, that space which is closer to the center of truth and solemnity. The sermon or speech can do this in their way, if they partake of the gifts of poetry, as in, say, the speeches of Martin Luther King or Eugene Debs.

The poem has a particular power to move us, assuming our willingness to be moved, out of the world of chatter and triviality and closer to our true selves and to the gifts of courage, humility, serenity, compassion, and joy which are our true inheritance. A bigot or demagogue can use the same skills, in a speech or a sermon, to move us to a very different place entirely. Such movement is a misuse of that power, but the concept of movement holds.

The poem, the true poem, appears to be proof against such movement into the bigotry and belligerence of the demagogue. Can you think of a single great poem that does not move the reader to a greater compassion? Perhaps it is my prejudice, but I cannot think of a single one.

Therefore, to write such a poem as I am imagining is a spiritual project. that involves three commitments.

            The first is the commitment to craft. I grew up among craftspeople. My father was a carpenter and I learned from him to cut and trim, to make solid joints, to build something that will hold up. My mother knit. I learned from her to keep the needles moving; the shapeless ball of yarn will eventually become a sweater.  If I want to become a poet, I must study the work of other poets to discover what is worthy in them and to gain the tools and skills I need. I also study the speech of the people around me, especially those whose language has not been homogenized by miseducation, and whose words are close to the earth, close to the street. I experiment, test, hone skills, work, and re-work until I have a thing in front of me I can call a true poem.         

The second is the commitment to community. If I want to become a poet, I must seek to stretch a bridge from one human soul to another. To do this, I need to be attentive to the heart, that of others and of myself. For the truth of a true poem is found, not in any abstract principle the poem might assert, but in the truth of the human heart it may have uncovered (or re-discovered) for the poet and for the reader.

            The third is the commitment to silence. Even the poet with a fully developed belief system must listen for what he or she has yet to learn. And so, the true poem emerges from study, attentiveness, and a willingness to remain silent long enough that the truth of the poem can emerge.

            To get to that silence amid the necessary clatter that is the lumber of the poem, this is no easy trick.

            I have no easy tricks for you; I have no tricks at all. This is not the sort of book which will tell you the nine things you must do to get a publishable poem. Instead, it is an extended meditation on the notion I expressed in the first sentence of this essay: that the mission of the poem is to move the soul. I have tried to discuss the particulars of that mission as I understand them. In my study, I have found that the poem, beyond that general mission I have stated, has at least these subset missions or movements:

·      The poem is a frame for silence.

·      The poem bears truth, but only the truth the poem can bear.

·      The poem helps us see what we might not otherwise see.

·      The poem builds community.

·      The poem is a comfort in affliction and an antidote to despair.

·      The poem empowers the movement for justice.

·      The poem is a prayer for those who might not otherwise pray.

·      The poem is a doorway to joy.

            There are probably others. I will probably think of others as soon as I close this project. But this is enough for now. I hope this can be useful for you. It has certainly been useful to me.

* *

Why this book?

            I have spent much of my life straddling two worlds. One of these is the world of work, mostly among people who know or care little about the other, that of literary study. I majored in English in college and studied English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago with the intention of a career as a teacher and student of literature, my love then and now. I completed an M.A. and was accepted into the UC doctoral program.

            However, life intervened in the form of a child. I had to decline the graduate offer and find a job.

            I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had somehow stayed with graduate study and become that professor. But I have no regrets. The child grew into a wonderful daughter and I have had interesting work, mostly as a substance abuse counselor (long story there), but also as a community organizer, factory worker, and union steward, with stints as house painter and farm hand. Instead of studying the work of others, I have written my own books of poetry and fiction.

            I kept some ties to formal literary study by teaching as an adjunct, by writing my own stories and poems, and by the occasional book review or essay. But my primary experience of literature has been than of the common, non-scholarly reader. I have some of the critical apparatus that formal education in literary criticism brings, but not enough to keep me out of errors, mistakes, and mis-use of critical language.

            One example is my use of the term “sign,” which has a particular meaning in critical theory, one which is highly useful as one of the keys to open up a text. I will not dispute or deny the value of such a critical tool and the particularized meaning of the term for a contemporary literary critic. But when I wrote “The Poem Helps Us See What We Might Not Otherwise See,” the original title was, “The Poem as Sign.” I was told by a friend who is up on this sort of things that “sign” in contemporary critical theory had a very specific meaning which had no relation to what I was doing in this essay. I was thinking only of the more pedestrian sort of sign that you read when you’re looking for a restroom or that my neighbors post when they’re holding a yard sale, the sign as a guide for perception, a way to steer one’s attention toward something you might otherwise miss. In my use of the word, the poem is one of those signs to direct the attention of the reader to something the poet perceives, either prior to the poem or in the process of writing the poem itself.

            So, let me say here that the terms and concepts in this book are the result of my own thought and reading and life experience. The concepts and categories here have come to me without direct reference to current critical theory. They may repeat other concepts and categories; they may contradict others. They may be altogether new. My hope is that my book does all three. I would hope it builds on what others have done, that it challenges what others have done, and that I have done a few things no one has done before. That would be nice.

            However it shakes out, this book is my take on what work a poem does in the world. What does a poem give us? What would we lose if we had none of the gifts that the poem brings to the world?

            Looking toward that end, let me confess that I am operating from a set of prejudices. I don’t think I am alone in my prejudices, but I have to recognize that other people, including people whom I respect a great deal, have prejudices of their own that they are willing to defend just as I defend mine.

            So, rather than beginning in a spirit of argument, let me announce that I will announce my beliefs about the mission of the poem as clearly as possible, but I will try to avoid argument or denigration of the beliefs of another.

            And this is only right. For in the writing of this book, I have revised my opinions in places, and in others changed them altogether. For example, I had long shuffled William Bronk off to the corner in which I tucked poets I considered too heady and cognitive. Finally, under the continued coaxing of my friends Robert Murphy and Norman Finkelstein, I looked at the work of Bronk in a serious way and I saw what my friends had seen all along, the poetry of a soul in search.

            This book began as a single essay on poetry and silence that I wrote under the inspiration of Norman’s book, Lyrical Interference. Essays continued to come until I had said all that I wanted to say. There is probably a lot more to be said. And I invite you to say it.

            I wrote this book over a period of several years, most of it at home in Cincinnati, but bits of it in Montreal and Albuquerque on visits. I wrote other pieces at the World Fellowship Center in Conway, New Hampshire, yet others in New York City; New Brunswick New Jersey; Portland, Oregon; and Amherst Massachusetts. I composed pieces of it at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee and at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and in Scott Goebel’s mountaintop writers cabin outside Whitesburg, Kentucky. I tinkered with it late at night over the kitchen table and in the morning at coffee shops. I have worried over it in planes and airports and on picnic tables on roadside rests along various Interstate highways. Whatever piece of it I was working on at the time usually went back and forth with me to work, wherever I was working. Please don’t tell my supervisor, but I wrote pieces of it while pretending to take notes in trainings or during meetings.

            So, I would like to thank all who provided me space and time for writing, including friends and relatives in all the places I just named, but also Delta Airlines and the Ohio Department of Transportation.

            Friends who helped shape this book, either as readers of my clumsy early drafts or as discussants include Elissa Pogue (my wife and best friend ever), Richard Hague, Chris Green, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Murphy, Jenifer Vernon, John Crawford, Patricia Clark Smith, Bob Cummings, Scott Goebel, P.J. Laska, and all the members of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, and Bill Sanders, Amanda Wolfe, Barbara Flick, Jason Dean, Georgine Getty, Acela Baladad, Dennis Kurlas, Amber Paul, and Steve Lansky of the First Sunday No-Name Writers Group.