Writing for My Life
I've been around. Flying too fast from post to post. Scrolling beyond belief. I've had one-hundred tabs open. I've played phone games and watched television at the same time. Yes, my inner world may be crumbling. I think I'll start a blog. Shall we gather some of the pieces? Together? In public?
I don't know how to solve inscrutable problems except by walking and by writing.
My professor and mentor (fellow walker/writer), Dr. Kate Haake often urged us to "write for our lives". A few years ago when I was drafting my poetry collection and writing daily, I felt the truth in her urging. As I wrote, my soul began to take up space and reside more comfortably in the world. Now, I read Gregory Orr's Poetry as Survival to study this truth that, in theory, I hold to be self-evident (I’ve also been reading the Declaration of Independence with my students, who have been remixing the language as found poetry after Tracy K. Smith). In practice, I tend to sideline writing for more handy, even lazy, consolation.
Poetry As Survival is a series of essays on the power of lyric poetry to help us survive, that is, to help "individuals survive the existential crisis represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one" (4). Poetry, he argues, is where order and disorder meet. We bring our pain, emotional chaos, and disturbing experiences into the arena of the "ordering powers of imagination and the cultural tool of language" (83).
Orr demonstrates the "enormous transformative power" of poetry by sharing an autobiographical story of loss and survival. He also cites a number of striking poems that evidence the poet's urge toward healing. I'd like to share two of them here.
The first is from Walt Whitman, "A Noiseless Patient Spider", originally part of his poem "Whispers of Heavenly Death", written for The Broadway, A London Magazine, issue 10. I love a good spider poem, and who better to celebrate the smallest corners of our country than Old Greybeard himself? Every once in a while, someone reminds me to pick up Whitman again, and I'm never sorry for it.
The second poem is a beautiful and mysterious lyric by D.H. Lawrence called "Song of a Man Who Has Come Through". In his discussion of this poem, Orr writes,
We must become vulnerable to what is out there (or inside us). Not in order to be destroyed or overwhelmed by it, but as part of a strategy for dealing with it and surviving it. Lyric poetry tells us that it is precisely by letting in disorder that we will gain access to poetry’s ability to help us survive. It is the initial act of surrendering to disorder that permits the ordering powers of the imagination to assert themselves.
In other words, we must let the "strange angels" in. We must admit them. We must.
xAB
A Noiseless Patient Spider
by Walt Whitman
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
“Song of a Man Who Has Come Through”
by D. H. Lawrence
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the
world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the
Hesperides.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
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