Christian Wiman’s question reverberates in my mind: “What is poetry’s role when the world is burning?”
If 2020 and 2021 have taught us anything, it’s brought us face-to-face with the ways in which the world is indeed on fire: Death, systemic injustice, unrest, political upheaval, the banal uncertainties, privations, and isolation of pandemic life. What good is poetry in such a world? Why celebrate poetry in April 2021?
Well, I’ll answer Wiman’s question with Annie Dillard’s. Dillard asks, “assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. […] What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
Most things I’m grateful for that make me think life is worth living don’t necessarily solve practical problems. What does a kiss solve? Practically speaking, nothing. Yet though they remain, the problems recede and feel more bearable having received that gift. A few years ago when I entered the room where my grandmother was on her deathbed, I was taken aback at her gaunt frame and undyed hair. “Come here and give me a kiss,” she labored to tell me. I kissed her forehead and held her hand because I could do nothing else. I wonder if poetry inhabits a similar category: like every human relationship, poetry is more complex than a problem-solution equation.
One year ago, when we were about to enter lockdown and the libraries were about to close, I called on Dillard’s criteria: What could I read that wouldn’t feel false? Poetry was one answer–Louise Glück and Heather McHugh in particular–an answer I wanted to share with others: When I was unemployed last summer, I hosted small backyard poetry readings. I listened to Poetry Unbound. There, outside with a few friends and wine and a potpourri of poems, or in the quiet company of Padraig O’Tuama’s voice playing from my phone, poetry provided connection and groundedness.
And this year—of all years—poetry made the headlines. (Not that art needs headline treatment to justify itself.) Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem and the way she read it brought poetry into more public conversations than I have ever witnessed. She made a deeply divided nation proud.
Poetry is not always a balm. Sometimes it aims to make you uncomfortable. After all, cliches and sentimentality are useless for “terminal patients.” Last summer I enrolled in a poetry workshop with Natasha Oladokun, and we read Ai’s “Interview with a Policeman.” Though written in the 80s, it felt like it could have been written yesterday. Entering the persona of this particular policeman is challenging. Reading it forced me to recognize the humanity of a policeman who has shot a young Black man, while the policeman’s defensiveness confronted my own complicity. We also read Li-Young Lee’s “Winter Vegetable,” a quiet poem about the poet’s parents’ morning ritual. The poem is simple in some ways but undergirded by loving attention and a respect for what is within and just outside his view in his parents’ marriage.
Learning to see the humanity in someone we might wish to vilify, being awoken to our own culpability, or paying attention to the beauty of an often overlooked, everyday moment are all gifts poetry can offer.
In my role as poetry editor at The Curator, I receive the gift of reading other poets’ poems and have the distinct honor of giving those poems a home in our little corner of the Internet.
The world may still be burning. Poetry can’t stamp out the flames of injustice, disease, division, or natural disaster. It can, however, confront us. It can help us see what we might otherwise not. It carries voices across the world or across a room. A poem is like that kiss my grandmother asked for and received in the face of her inevitable mortality: a small, gratuitous, essential act of acknowledgment.
What more fitting way to celebrate National Poetry Month than hear poets read their poems? The Curator-published poets we’ve invited to read have written poems that made me slow down, or smile, or come away with a renewed sense of wonder, or confronted me with something that might be uncomfortable. Join us on April 29 at 5:30 pm PDT to hear six Curator-published poets read their work.
