National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

What does poetry matter during a time of plague? Has poetry ever stopped a plague? Probably not. Has it ever stopped a war? I don’t have the data but I’m going to say it’s probably doubtful.

So then what does it matter? What can poetry, or any art for that matter, do for us, right now?

At its best: poetry tells the truth. It tells the truth in a way that gets at what is beyond words. That knowing just beyond sight, beyond hearing. It gets to truths that aren’t able to be codified or ordered. It gets to the kind of truths that don’t just happen in the brain, but in the whole body, in the soul, in the heart. And even if the truth that the poem is expressing is something that could, by the right person, be distilled down into a digestible sentence in a text book – what poetry does is give the reader, or hearer, an experience of that truth.

And an experience requires participation. It requires a meeting between the object of art, the poem, and the person reading it. In between is a third thing (as D.H. Lawrence would have called it), a meeting, a negotiation between the poem and the reader. The meaning is there – but it’s also, in that moment, in us.

Poetry, as well as other art forms: music, painting, sculpture – opens the possibility within human beings of being able to hold multiple truths at one time. What John Keats called “Negative Capability”. Here’s the bit from a letter where he first mentions it: “I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In the midst of uncertainty, anxiety, and doubt – in the midst of fear and threat – what better skill than to be able to hold it all in balance within ourselves: the fear, the hope, the conflicting sources of pain and joy.

And of course, poetry invokes Beauty. A whole treatise unto itself … Whether you think that beauty is the driving force of life that sparks evolution, cell mutation, the co-arising of bee and flower, the language created by a pine tree as it spins out the patterning of its DNA, ring by ring. Or if you believe that beauty sings from inside a balanced mathematical equation, that it is the force of gravity and the movement of planets. Or the painting of a twisted, violent, yellow tree against a deep blue sky.

For me poetry helps because it reminds me of what humans can be. It reminds me of why we might be here. It reminds me of what we might do, how we might see. And how we might change the world to make it more true, more beautiful.

And so … a poem. By the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, from her 1990 book In Mad Love and War.

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.