Note: This post concludes our Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration 2021. For all the poetry readings from this event with Marly Youmans, Malcolm Guite, Michael Joyce, Leonard A. Slade, Jr, Luke Stromberg, and more, click below.
A few months ago Brynna asked that I contribute some thoughts on poetry for the Cathedral Poetry Celebration. In my usual fashion I tarried and dithered, began several projects and aborted each one a day later. Although capable of talking about poetry at length and pausing only to breathe, I found myself unable to piece together any coherent thoughts on this. So I’ve decided to try and answer a basic question that I struggled to answer two months ago.
The question is quite simple: why poetry? A friend asked this because she experienced, as anyone who speaks to me for any length of time has also experienced, that I am utterly and incurably obsessed with poetry. It has been the entire focus of my life since I was a teenager: determined the course of my studies in both undergraduate and graduate school, and is the thing I wake up to do and go to bed thinking about. It is the without-which-not of my being; and doing, pursuing, and reading poetry have quite literally determined the course of my life. That I was unable to answer the question at the time was puzzling to me; on reflection, the difficulty is that it feels a bit like trying to describe why one loves a spouse or parent. It can be done but feels like something is missing, as if there’s something that can’t be translated about it.
Just as a relationship makes one feel a certain way, the answer to the question isn’t capable of being expressed in points or propositions. It’s phenomenal, an experience. Like being in the Cathedral itself, being inside of a poem (for that is what one does when one reads it) is a full body sensation: the rhythms of the lines mimic the rhythms felt in music or dance, the sounds of words creates a music that is heard when spoken aloud and sensed when read silently, the interplay of syntax and semantics can create a felt force of meaning as in a violin concerto or in a painting. Poetry, I think I’m saying, is something that has to be lived.
Those of us who live poetry are what I and others in this lifestyle refer to as “poetry people.” Poetry people are delightful. Capable of fantastic polemics over the merits of small presses versus large publishing house, they have felt the pull of poetry, felt the things I’ve described, learned to inhabit the poem and known it to “be the finale of seem.” And we do inhabit a poem when we read it, making of it our own until the “poem is you.” The poem is “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” and we are able to return to it at will, able to find a friend (and often a new friend) each time we come back to it. Wallace Stevens’ “Idea of Order at Key West” is a poem I’ve had memorized for close to ten years now, a poem perfectly describing poetry and the act of creation and the impossibility of poetry. Each time I read it again I am thrilled all over as if reading it for the first time. Perhaps that is poetry.
The poet Mary Ruefle has written an essay about how she became a poet, and which everyone reading this should immediately read after finishing my own little piece. She writes that she became a poet for a “single, simple reason: I liked making similes for the moon.” Ted Berrigan once wrote “Now what is a poet? A poet is someone who writes poems,” a lovely account that cuts through the mysticism often present in discussions about poetry.
Brynna has said (accused?) that I desire to heal the world through poetry. I think my goal is more modest: I want to heal you through poetry. I want you to experience the fullness of time and thought that poetry brings; to read more poetry, good, bad or indifferent; to feel and know that in this transitory life there are objects made, “eternal lines to time” that hold more than we can ever know. Poetry teaches. Obliquely it instructs in the full measure of human life, from the ecstasy of despair to the agony of beauty, poetry incorporates all aspects of thought and experience and makes of them objects to be delighted in. Instruction in these experiences is essential, at times, for really feeling and understanding them. And poetry demands of us that we think with it, move from word to word and line to line with it. By inhabiting the poem we make of it our own, and our life is thereby made fuller with this additional force behind it.
My life has been made immeasurably fuller through poetry. I have personally experienced this and felt poetry working on me to expand my mind and consciousness. Through the poetry of people different from us, such as the poetry of Wanda Coleman, Adrienne Rich, or CAConrad we gain a perspective and a way of thinking that’s not ours. This perspective gives us a new way to live and think, which is a new way to be beyond ourselves.
And getting beyond ourselves is the point of poetry. Poetry gives us news, the news that “men die miserably” for lack of. I have been helped by this news more times than I can count. A few years ago when I was going through a difficult time in my life, I picked up John Ashbery’s book-length poem Flow Chart. Reading that long poem brought me out of myself and into a new place of life. It opened up new environments and ways of thinking. I think poetry can do this for you too, that it can help you when you don’t know you need it. That it can open, create, new worlds and pictures of understanding. Poetry can lead you through much that you “would not understand” and give you a new place to look from, a new vantage point to sight life from.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration. I hope that you’ve seen a bit of what poets toil for, that you’ve read a bit of the news they publicize, and that it’s helped enrich your life. I know it has mine.
Oh, I’ve not answered the question of why poetry. As I said, the question can’t be answered in propositions and neat solutions. It can only be answered in life, for that is what poetry has to offer: life. It offers life in words and thoughts, life in sensations and experiences, and life in poetry. But sometimes I like an easy answer to the questions I ask. So I’ll try to answer the question simply, and without the debris of a felt lifetime.
Why poetry? Because it is new life.
Evan Craig Reardon is a poet and librarian. Evan is the archivist and poetry consultant for the Cathedral of All Saints. He is completing a Master’s in Library and Information Science at SUNY Albany where he researches archives and records management, and is completing a Master’s in English literature where he researches poetry and poetics, also at SUNY Albany. He is the librarian and archivist for the Flow Chart Foundation, and an associate librarian for the North Chatham Public Library.