Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2024
On Poetry, guest editorial by Daniel Lusk.
I came early to love writing poetry because I found that in writing poetry nothing I had felt, observed, recalled, dreamed or imagined (no matter how joyful or bad) was either worthless or wasted. And it offered any of these as connections by which one might “tag” the experience of readers.
My instincts for poetry were born of reading first the King James Bible and after that a rich inheritance of poets like Wordsworth, Roethke, Oliver, and Wendell Berry, who loved Nature. As a boy, I thought my love for such language and preoccupations suggested a life as a preacher. But by the time I graduated from college, having served a number of rural churches in Iowa and South Dakota, I had discovered the great variety of human beliefs and superstitions about our common origins and place in the natural world. I no longer held the tenets of the religion of my youth to be sacred and had turned instead to singing and writing poetry. It was not the European post-World War II existentialists or the bucolic poetry of Kenneth Rexroth or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” that prompted me to leave the church. But they showed me the way out.
Here’s the beginning of a poem by Francis Ponge, “The Delights of the Door,” that suggests what I had begun to discover instead:
Kings don’t touch doors.
They don’t know this joy: to push before us
one of one of those huge panels
we know so well, then to turn back in order to replace it—
holding a door in our arms.
Here was a way of praying that did not have a human at the center of it, as the recipient of the favor being asked.
When I left the church, having tried to be a preacher, and having failed at it (my sermons were never longer than five minutes, and in Bible study I argued against literal readings of scripture). In one interim assignment to a pair of cowboy churches in western South Dakota, I found myself happiest and my parishioners most responsive when I was drafted as an extra hand for branding, moving cattle in the Badlands, painting the steeple and scuffing the hardpan at the bottom of a new grave in the churchyard.) Yet my early poems were something like prayer.
I wanted to speak to the great Invisible, to express the gnawing doubts and hopes and yearnings I felt about life and love and sorrow.
In his book The Spell of the Sensuous philosopher and magician David Abrams suggests that, when he went looking for shamans in Bali, over and over again he found them living outside the community, at the edge of wilderness. It was, he learned, because their role in the community was to live at the margins, and to remind people who came to them with problems, that their problems were almost always because their lives had fallen out of balance.
Abrams maintains that “the medicine person’s primary allegiance…is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which the community is embedded…” I would say this description fits some of our best poets as well. And while I don’t think a poet need be any sort of medicine person, it does seem to me an appropriate role for a poet to work in the manner of Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver to maintain the awareness of humans that our communities depend on the wild, non-human world that surrounds and sustains us.
The poet Robert Bly has suggested that this role is dangerous because it tends to separate the poet from the community. I would argue that, like the shamans David Abrams encountered, the human community needs poets who remind us that our place in the natural order is not a privileged one, that such humility is essential.
It seems to me that earth and nature must be the basis—the fundament—of all moral and social values, and of any viable religion, philosophies or economies of human kind. There is a sort of Kantian logic in this: a culture or people may not stake its future on principles or policies that will ultimately destroy it. And a poetry of self-absorption is the moral equivalent of the principle held by many, including many of our leaders, that “this world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.”
Writing my own poetry is intrinsically ironic, for it employs a tool (writing) which is conceptual to affect images and sensory/visceral/emotional impact on a reader. In other words using a linear device to suggest images and sounds and rhythms that exist only when experienced again, as it were second-hand, in the mind of the beholder.
Such poetry strains against the literal, for even as an image in a poem conjures up visual or other sensory and visceral responses in a given reader (and of course different for each), it signals to that reader’s subconscious in ways that call forth unconscious and primal and dream-life responses, responses that defy rationality and literal experience. Because the words mean little until they are strung together, and because the reader/listener must create from experiencing them the images intended (or something like what was intended) by the poet—this is more “magic” than “message”—more conjuring than communicating.
Aside from the irony of using nouns and verbs and adjectives to suggest pictures to a reader, this poetry of image also has the effect of reaffirming the innate connection between our human perceptions and the sensible world of animals and plants around and outside us—their non-human perceptions and languages.
Children know instinctively that poems are magical. They also know that the natural world experiences us in the same way we instinctively experience it—that nature is not a science project but life to be shared. And they know that words and phrases have power.
Here are some poems written during my workshops long ago by second graders, children who had not yet been influenced about what poetry might be or do:
Peacock’s secret:
to keep the family together
by calling out in deep voices. Angela C.
Nov. Friday. dark of the sea
deep. Feeling something in him I know.
Rocks broken and shells broken
Glowing in the dark I heard the
world coming up I saw it
too. I like seeing it in mind. Mandy H.
I saw the trees singing
and. Swaying and. The
ground lifting up and.
I saw lights and. Saw
the tree whistling music. Kurt H.
Music
The church. it is coming
from the church. and it is
flying like the wind. Raymond L.
© Daniel Lusk
Daniel Lusk is author of eight poetry collections and other books, most recently Every Slow Thing, poetry (Kelsay Books 2022) and Farthings, eBook (Yavanika Press 2022). Well-known for his teaching and widely published in literary journals, his genre-bending essay, “Bomb” (New Letters) was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Native of the prairie Midwest and a former commentator on books for NPR, Daniel and his wife, Irish poet Angela Patten, live in Vermont. Book available at Kelsey Books (Utah) https://kelsaybooks.com/collections/all/daniel-lusk