Authors and After Words

We are already past the middle of our celebration of National Poetry Month. That’s too bad because these annual events are beginning to feel like a tribal reunion in which our poets gather to hear new poems and new voices, learn about new projects, and celebrate the accomplishments of the past year.

These events, however, are not held merely so that our poets may gather and listen to each other’s works. They are also held for the benefit of a wider audience, an audience, it must be said, that does not always turn out in the numbers we would like to see. That’s too bad, not so much for the poets, though they deserve a wider audience, but even more so for the absent audience itself. Poetry, along with the visual arts, music, drama, and some fiction, can function beyond the level of simple entertainment. The arts are the means through which we learn, celebrate, and sometime mourn our selves and the world in which we live. If we only partake of the stuff that is dispensed as popular entertainment – yes, I know I may well be preaching to the choir here, but bear with me – we are taking in the artificial culture provided for profit by mega-manufactures who serve the lowest cultural denominator. More often than not, such fare is forgotten even before we’ve had time to dream upon it. Local artists, however, (and by that I mean local in spirit as well as place) breathe the same air we do and search for the purer spirits and cherish the plainer facts about experience; they are the ones who really show us who we are, how we can better understand ourselves and how we can live more harmoniously in our own, shared world.

Consider the following: In the poems published alongside this particular column, to greater or lesser degrees, there is information and there are feelings that cement my relationship with people I know and see and talk with on a more or less regular basis. In Michael Farmer’s agonizing haiku (“i drop my ronson…”) I am taken into the devastation of war and my heart and mind are joined with his as he expresses his experience. Then, in another haiku, he speaks another truth about war. That haiku tells me: watch the rhetoric/they did not give up their lives/their lives were taken. Through these poems, Michael and I become brothers in our common human tribe. In Barbara Larsen’s poem about the Great Depression, I hear once again the stories my parents told about survival in those hard and cruel times. Through this hearing and remembering she and I become brother and sister in our common human tribe. After reading Nancy Rafal’s progressive catalogue of the landscape of Door County, my own drives through this county will no longer be a matter of mere getting through but rather of being in, of belonging to. Henceforth, Nancy and I are co-travelers through the shared landscape of our common human tribe.

Poetry, because of the intimacy of voice, is one of the best ways to experience this bringing in and becoming together. Poetry facilitates communion, the sharing of the prayers of our human kind, the reaching out to give and receive the peace that we so badly need from our brothers and sisters, our peers, our neighbors, our friends. We are a communal species and the more community we can share, the richer we become in community. That is the ultimate prayer of poetry.

I mentioned earlier the experience of locality of spirit. This incident will illustrate more clearly what I mean. In heading towards this years observances, I was reading the poetry of Ted Kooser. On the way to the dentist one morning, I read his poem, “Casting Reels.” It’s about the artifacts of fly-fishing and the men who use them. My father was such a man. His fishing rods and reels and his creel hang in my garage. The grass he plucked to protect the fish he caught is still in the creel. I used to watch him for hours, whipping that rod back and forth and placing that fly in the space of a dime, right where he wanted it. I was awed by his skill and his elegance. But alas, he and I could never find the words to speak much of our softer feelings for each other, let alone speak them eloquently. Kooser’s poem spoke to me of two things. The first thing was the infinite variation of our shared craft. The second thing, and this was a sudden thing which leapt up from a far and hidden place, the second more important thing was the memory of my own father – and of love unspoken. That is the web that poetry can weave – one soul connecting with another soul connecting with another on and on. In that way poetry is what we do, who we are, who we wish we had been and who we might become. In that way, poetry utters our common prayers.