I came to poetry after a long career as a public-interest lawyer, after a life-threatening illness, and after my children were fully grown and beginning to have children of their own.
I am enormously grateful to have this chance for a second career. Every day I learn something new from reading poems and working on my own. And I’m also grateful to the many people who have helped me start and continue on this winding, mysterious and wonderful path.
How does a poem begin?
A poem can begin so many ways: an overheard conversation on the street, a memory, good or bad, an obsession. A poem can begin with learning a new word. A poem can begin with seeing a painting, a piece of music, a dead bat on the street, a live seagull landing on a Manhattan sidewalk, the sound of a vireo at dusk in the forest, something your mother said to you fifty years ago, your father’s death, a newspaper article. A poem begins with summer noon silence in the Catskill mountains, someone’s eyes on a subway, someone’s tattoo, someone else’s poem. A poem begins with paying attention, being awake to the world around us and our lives. A poem begins with joy, with sadness, with outrage. A poem begins in our dreams, and in the space between sleeping and waking.
Why is poetry important?
There are many angles from which to look at the importance of poetry.
As someone who spent much of my career as a public interest attorney, I love thinking about how poetry can open hearts and minds. Taking into account W.H. Auden’s great saying that “poetry makes nothing happen,” on the other hand, I’m struck that Percy Bysshe Shelley, called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world, “in freeing our imaginations, our profound sense of what’s right, our visceral connection to the world around us.” Or as Audre Lorde put it, “poetry is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” I don’t think you can quite say that about any other form of writing. I like to think poetry can help galvanize readers to address issues like the environmental crisis or the crisis of racism in our society head on, with enthusiasm and without the paralyzing fear that leads to indifference and inaction. As the Malaysian poet Cecil Rajendra put it, “…I want the cadences of my verse to crack/the carapace of indifference/prise open torpid eyelids/thick-coated with silver...”
As to the importance of poetry, the great Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday said: “I believe poetry is the highest form of verbal expression.” And in the words of the poet Vievee Francis, in “A Small Poem,” “…a single word/ can set the world turning from one moment into/the next in startlement.”
A poem can say what has never been said before, at least in that way, and by that person. That possibility of a wild freshness of language is unique to poetry. And like music, like art, poetry is “play.” As the poet William Matthews said, “Content is often unsettling or painful in poems, but form is play, a residue of the fun the poet had while working. Of course, like form and content, pain and fun want to be each other.”
Poetry can be a source of comfort. When the philosopher Richard Rorty was dying, he talked about how he found no consolation in religion or philosophy. The only thing he found of use was poetry, finding consolation in the images and the rhyme and rhythm. “In lines such as these,” he writes of Swinburne and Landor, images, rhyme and rhythm “conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve.”
Poetry is a way to declare our freedom. The great Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, imprisoned for his beliefs, wrote of his love of life from prison, in his “Letters From a Man in Solitary,” “Sunday today./Today they took me out in the sun for the first time./And I just/stood there, struck for the first time in my life/by how far away the sky is,/how blue/and how wide./Then I respectfully sat down on the earth./I leaned back against the wall./For a /moment no trap to fall into,/no struggle, no freedom, no wife./Only earth, sun, and me…/I am happy.”
Poetry helps us remember not to take life for granted, reminding us, as the secular Buddhist philosopher Stephen Batchelor says, “How extraordinary it is to be here at all.” Poetry may be the closest thing we have to prayer in a secular world. It can bring solace to the poet, and also to the reader. A poem that is to me very much like prayer is Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats”: “may the tide/that is entering even now/the lip of our understanding/carry you out/beyond the face of fear/may you kiss/the wind then turn from it/certain that it will/love your back may you/open your eyes to water/water waving forever/and may you in your innocence/sail through this to that.”
As secular prayer, poetry can celebrate, mourn, inspire. And maybe, ultimately, the most wonderful thing about poetry is that it says the unsayable. As poet laureate Joy Harjo put it, "I think of poetry as a place beyond words... you know, the paradox is, we use words to get there."
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
My first response to this question was that there are so many poets to read, I only move forward. But as I’ve thought about it, there are many poems and books I return to for comfort and renewal.
First, slightly off topic but important to me is that I try to read the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” first thing every morning. That and Tricycle’s “Daily Dharma” are essential to me as I start my day.
I always return to the poems of Apollinaire, particularly “Le Pont Mirabeau.” Nothing is more musical to my ear than that poem in French. And all of Apollinaire’s poetry, which I first studied in college as a French literature major, is a source of comfort and pleasure.
I find inspiration in Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come,” and in its opposite, Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle.” The latter I first read in high school.
I always feel better when I’ve read a poem of Frank O’Hara’s.
As a mindfulness student and teacher, I often return to Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Kindness,” to Kabir, to Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow.”
I love haiku, and here’s one that is with me constantly, by Basho, translated by Jane Hirshfield,
In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.
And, speaking of Hirshfield, I often think about this poem of hers, “It Was Like This: You Were Happy.”
I love Czesław Miłosz, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda.
I find comfort in my battered paperback copy of Six Centuries of Great Poetry, edited by Robert Penn Warren & Albert Erskine (Dell, 1955, 75 cents), Gerard Manley Hopkins, particularly “Spring and Fall,” which I studied in tenth grade, my Selected Poetry of W.H. Auden, reissued in ’58. I often reread the work of Yehudi Amichai.
I know I’ve left off many poets and poems I admire. Another time! What a pleasure to think about this and look over my bookshelves.
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
The way my poetry first enters the world keeps changing and evolving. At the moment, I’m in two peer-to-peer writers’ groups, one has been going for six years. There are three of us, all in separate locations, all graduates of the same MFA program, and every month we send the other participants three poems, sometimes new work, and sometimes revisions, and then each poet sends a letter commenting on the work of the other two, again to everyone. It’s based on the model of study we learned in grad school. We send our poems religiously on the first of the month and respond a couple of days later. It’s been a wonderful source of discipline and support.
In addition, I’ve recently joined a second peer-to-peer group where four of us meet on Zoom one evening a month for two hours. We send in one poem a day the day before, and the others give feedback. Each poem is the focus of the discussion for thirty minutes. It’s gratifying to give and receive this live feedback.
Finally, I participate in a biweekly three-hour Saturday workshop where we generate poems (also on Zoom). That has been a source of new material and helped me think about my work in a fresh way, revisit my obsessions with new metaphors, and from fresh angles.
What are you working on?
I’m working on three new writing projects, the first a feuilleton of photographs and poems about fall, 2020 in the Hudson Valley, with the photographer, Michael Palmer.
I’ve also had a third full poetry collection in the works for several years and find myself replacing older poems that no longer feel quite strong or fresh enough with new ones I’m excited about. I’m struggling with this collection more than I did with the first two. The intertwining of the vastness and indifference of the universe with the minute, precious, and heart-breaking details of our small lives feels like my current subject, a variation, I suppose on two great subjects of poetry: life and death.
Finally, I’m collaborating with another poet on a chapbook of modern crowned sonnets, where we alternate lines in an email correspondence. Things are turning up on the page that neither of us would have imagined on our own.
