“on poetry” — ericagailpolakoff
(or as Audre Lorde eloquently wrote in Sister/Outsider, “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” [Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.])
Soon after the official “stay at home” mandate was issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we started our weekly poetry zooms. For each session, we collected one or two poems to share with the group. Generally, one of us would suggest a theme or a poet to focus on for the following week. Then we would all come together (virtually), read the poems together, sometimes even listen to the poet reading her or his work, collectively struggle over meanings, often finding connections to the words and sentiments, frequently marveling over the constructions and the metaphors.
I think it’s safe to say we all agree that poetry saved us. Of course, not only during our weekly zooms—the comradeship they engendered, and the often unique interpretations of, or insights into a poem that one or the other of us would have—but also during the week in anticipation of our meeting. That is, in the “treasure hunt” for just the right one (or two) poems that expressed a feeling that somehow touched us or spoke to us in some way, or intersected with our daily lives and experiences, our dreams, emotions or values, or challenged us, or surprised us, or made us laugh, or cry in joy or in sorrow. By now, we have shared hundreds of poems, among which we found many gems. It would be impossible to present all of them here but at the very least, I would like to acknowledge a few of the poets (and themes) that we collected and savored, and offer some comments. What I include here is from memory and therefore incomplete and rather sketchy and in no particular order—I am certain that the other members of our CLS collective will have plenty more to add in their blog posts.
Mary Oliver (a long-time favorite poet of mine and I think of all the others in our group). For me, Mary Oliver captures the essence of what Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about in Braiding Sweetgrass—relationships of respect and reciprocity between human beings and the natural world and all of its lifeforms, upon whom we are dependent for survival. This means we have a special responsibility to carry out our stewardship, consciously and conscientiously with integrity and honor. Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown on Cape Cod for many years, where my husband and I (and our dogs) have always gone for a couple of weeks every year. Many of Oliver’s poems are a tribute to the landscape and the critters there, the shore, the dunes, the freshwater ponds and forests, the translucent sunrises and sunsets with layers upon layers of blazing reds and oranges, subtle pinks and violets, crystal blues and gold, the way that light rays and moon beams reflect clouds on the surface of the water which endlessly changes colors—from midnight blue to azure blue, turquoise to emerald green and teal), and how the tides sculpt the sand. As a photographer, I have, over the years, tried to capture this beauty. Reading Mary Oliver always takes me there and reminds me of what is important. And, it is a fact—there is nowhere else I feel so at home.
Time out to walk the dogs!
Mark Doty, another denizen of the Cape (and of NYC). I am both captivated and humbled by Doty’s expression of friendship and love, loss and grieving, and resiliency. His poetry can be challenging but worth the effort. I am especially fond of his memoirs—the poetry of his prose. Firebird (a reference to Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” symphony—to which Doty loved to dance as a young boy), is a memoir of Doty’s childhood. He opens the story first with an epigram by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.” And then with a description of “Perspective Box with Views of a Dutch Interior,” painted by Samuel Von Hoogstraten in the 17th century, which Doty discovers in the National Gallery in London. A perspective box was an “experiment with the illusion of depth” (p.2) Doty goes back to the perspective box in his last chapter which he opens with the following: “The hallway opens on and on, in the nightmare house of the perspective box, a narrow gullet of space telescoping further and further, the boy at one end, mother at the other, the bullet—fired or unfired, does it matter?—traversing that length, never arriving, since time dilates there, too, the hallway traveling on for years, the uncertain duration of a lifetime…these two images, the terms which establish the parameters of my life. A boy lifted by music, his body become aerial and bright as the phoenix that music portrays—and that boy, years later, turning to ash, held in the sights of his mother’s gun” (p. 179).
One year at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, my husband and I happened upon Doty all alone in a room, packing up some of his books. Master of description, supremely intellectual, in person he struck me as a very cool and gentle soul. We talked about specific places on the Cape that we all frequented, our mutual love of dogs, and about living in NYC—all that we had read about in several of his memoirs. It was a totally unexpected meeting and conversation—a gift, to be sure.
One of Doty’s most recent books, What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2020), is a tribute to Whitman and the impact he had on Doty’s writing and sense of self. Doty’s goal, “to seek out the wellsprings of the extraordinary flowering that seemed to appear out of nowhere in the middle of his (Whitman’s) life, in poems that look, sound, and think like nothing else before them. They have already reshaped American poetry, and the poetry of other countries and continents as well, but they have not yet finished their work of recasting our sense of what it means to be oneself, to be anyone at all” (p. 7).
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It had always been a goal of mine to read Leaves of Grass all the way through. As a group we spent two weeks back-to-back discussing selected stanzas that spoke to us, or rather, sang to us.
In the Introduction to Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Edition (a 67th birthday present to me from Ann Marie), John Hollander writes: ”Self published, self-reviewed, (more than once), self-proclaiming, self-projecting, the corpus, the opera, the body of work and life of Walt Whitman, Jr., gave birth to itself in an astonishing volume; augmentations, revisions and rearrangements would occupy the poet’s creative life” (p. xi). And I would add, the whole of which seems to capture and describe all of humanity, all of life, with all five senses and well beyond the senses. Whitman grabs us at the first stanza of “Song of Myself”: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I shall assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Patrick Rosal, as an undergraduate at our college, Rosal originally majored in Business, but then switched to Creative Writing. He went on to graduate school in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence. Soon after that he returned to our college for a few years where he was an assistant professor of creative writing, teaching in the same Division as my husband. After he left the college, we would still bump into Rosal at the Dodge Poetry Festival, go to his poetry readings in NYC and have dinner together. Now at Rutgers University, Camden campus, still teaching, still winning awards for his work. Rosal writes about love, aging, Brooklyn, the Philippines, life. I love Rosal’s down-to-earth canter—his poems reading like songs or dances; rhythmic, they pulse and often surprise. One of my favorites is, “Children Walk on Chairs to Cross a Flooded Schoolyard,” which is based on a photo taken by Noel Celis in the tropical village of Taytay, Rizal Province, Philippines after a typhoon floods the village. It begins, “Hardly anything holds the children/ up, each poised/ mid-air, barely the ball of one small foot/ kissing the chair’s wood, so/ they don’t just step across, but pause above the water.” Then, in the middle of the poem he writes, “…I forget how disaster works, how it/can turn/a child back into a glistening/butterfish/or finches. And then they’ll do/what they do, which is teach the rest/of us/how to move with such natural/ gravity.” (In: Poem-a-Day, November 2, 2015, Academy of American Poets.)
One week our collective assignment was to find poems by the artists of the Harlem Renaissance (circa 1920’s): Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Gwendolyn Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson and more. My husband had presented many of these poets in his undergraduate course on the Harlem Renaissance, so he was a valuable resource. His insight aided our understanding of the issues and struggles confronting Black artists of that era.
We read contemporary poems by celebrated poets Natasha Tretheway, Tracy K. Smith, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Eavan Boland, Elizabeth Alexander—all of whom brilliantly performed their poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival over the years. The Dodge Festival began in 1986 and has taken place every other year since then. It is the largest poetry festival in North America. Poets and lovers (of poetry and otherwise) come from all around the globe. When my husband and I started going to the festival, the venue was Waterloo Village in Stanhope, NJ. All the events were outside in this gorgeous setting—trees, pond, streams, birds, sky. We could bring the dogs, sit on the grass, picnic and soak in the natural beauty of the surroundings and the created beauty of language in poetry. Strolling from tent to tent, we heard many poets for the first time. Several years ago, the venue changed to Newark. Events are held indoors, in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, in churches and in schools in downtown. While this change in venue makes the festival more accessible to everyone, I have to admit, I miss the ambience of the natural setting.
For just one week we focused on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. But of course, as is the case with all of our poets, how does one choose? I should mention that we often tried to gather background about the poets and for me, in this case, it meant sharing Wild Nights With Emily, an absolutely wonderful 2018 film directed by Madeleine Olnek, which I had seen at the Montclair Film Festival, the year before COVID. The film offers a very different view of Emily Dickinson than the one that is generally proffered. It focuses on DIckinson’s lifelong love relationship with Susan Gilbert. The two were friends as children; then Gilbert marries Dickinson’s brother and ends up living next door. Many of Dickinson’s poems were written as love letters to Gilbert, but apparently the publishers of her poetry changed her gender in the published versions.
In our weekly poetry zooms, we also reveled in, and paid close attention to the poetry of the Inaugural Poets, especially Maya Angelou, Richard Blanco, Elizabeth Alexander and Amanda Gorman—whose poetry soars!
We listened to hiphop lyrics, danced together (but apart), to Santana and others. We shared poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Hirshfield, Julia Alvarez, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda and Ada Limón.
Serendipitously, in early June 2021, we learned about, and fell in love with poet, Faith Shearin, after a chance encounter on Commercial Street in Provincetown, Cape Cod, but that’s Ann Marie’s story to tell.
Recently, we shared the poetry of Joy Harjo, master storyteller and our current U.S. Poet Laureate. In American Sunrise (NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), she provides the historical context for understanding the themes in many of her poems. That context has to do with the U.S.’s “Indian Policy” which included many “trails of tears”—the forced removal of Native peoples from their lands; the Dawes Act of 1887 which privatized communal lands, turning them into individual “allotments”; the Indian Boarding Schools—the policy that kidnapped Native children, taking them away from their communities and culture, indoctrinating them into the dominant values of the colonizers and punishing them for speaking their own language; the outlawing of Native ceremonies, indigenous beliefs and knowledge. And so, in “Song 3. Soldiers,” when Harjo writes, “We were ready to defend the land/ And the people against those/ Who wanted what was not theirs to take./ We were called heathen/ But who is heathen here?” (p. 39), we are not left wondering what this is all about.
In several of the college courses I taught on culture and identity, I had addressed this history of exploitation, exclusion and annihilation, these policies and their impact on the indigenous people who managed to survive. We examined similar policies enacted by the Euro-centric governments of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, as well as the United States. Together with my students, we watched films like Rabbit-Proof Fence (about the Aboriginal peoples of Australia), Once Were Warriors (about the Maori of New Zealand), Rhymes for Young Ghouls (about the First Nations—specifically the Mi’qmaq of Canada), and Smoke Signals (about Native Americans living on the Coeur d’Alene reservation in Idaho), all of which captured the history of generational racism and discrimination. We also read Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa. In this way, we witnessed through film and poetry, resistance to policies of exclusion, and to being demeaned and dehumanized by those who had become purveyors of the dominant culture.
I want to end this blog section with excerpts from an essay by Jane Hirshfield which she wrote for poets.org on July 1, 2018, entitled, “Poetry, Permeability and Healing”:
“To heal, is to take what is broken, separated, fragmented, injured, exiled and restore it to wholeness….
“Poems can be found, if they’re looked for, addressing every realm of what in our lives can feel broken: the heart’s injuries in the realms of intimate connection, in love, in friendship, in family. The distancing that comes with any form of grief, of fear, of anger. The brutalities and violence that occur among people whenever we feel ourselves set against one another, divided by any kind of boundary. Injustice. Powerlessness. The sense of erasure that comes with disrespect, nonrecognition, exclusion. The sense of lostness, confusion, incomprehension. The sense of isolation and separation from one’s own participation in existence. The evasion of death, which is ultimately an evasion of life. How can poems solve any of these conditions? Outwardly, they cannot…
(In poetry there is) “an enactment of the shift from powerless grief to something…utterly changed by its own terrible beauty, both born and borne. By a poem’s held beauty, our held terrors become bearable.
“…every truly good poem has in it, somewhere, an anchor dropped down into wholeness…
“Wholeness does not mean unmarred, or simple, or ignorant of suffering. It does not exclude any part of experience or history. Consider ‘kintsugi,’ a Japanese repair technique that is both an aesthetic and philosophical stance. In reassembling a broken tea bowl, a cup, or a plate, the artisan uses, in place of transparent glue, a mix of lacquer and powdered gold. The end result is not an object trying to appear as if it had not never been damaged: ‘kintsugi’ done well, offers damage made visible as part of the cup’s history, damage made beautiful because the cup was repaired without denial.”
Thus, for me, our poetry zooms promised survival and offered healing—not by denying suffering or injustice, racism, isolation, war or exclusion, grief or death, but by acknowledging all of these, by sprinkling a little gold dust and lacquer in the cracks and fissures, adding wisdom and awareness, beauty and love to all of our lives.
