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.

A personal lesson about fear ….

I haven’t posted a blog since just before the election. Right afterward I had lots of ideas for blogs, including one about fear. I wanted to post a poem by Joy Harjo called “I Give You Back.” It’s a poem I have loved for a long time. On the Wednesday following the election the poem deeply moved and inspired me to work past my initial grief and fear about the election results.

But I didn’t post that article. Or the three or four others I considered in the following weeks. A month later here I am. So why didn’t I post? What happened? Well … fear.

Fear is one of the great inventions of the human evolutionary process. Fear alerts us to danger, both physical and emotional, and can prompt us to respond in a way that will save our lives, triggering the “Fight or Flight” response.

Fear is usually real and valid. For immigrants, women, Muslims, and many others who Trump and his cabal of cronies maligned during the campaign, that fear is devastatingly real. For the working class that Trump promised to raise up that fear is likely to become real very soon. (He has already betrayed them with appointments like Andrew Puzder, CEO of Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s – who has come out as opposed to raising the minimum wage, against overtime pay, and against paid sick time, as well as being anti-union -- as Secretary of Labor.)

Like so many women out there who have been the object of sexual predation (in my early childhood and again in high school), I watched Trump’s campaign in horror. His arrogant dismissal of women, his school-boy name-calling, his body-shaming, his use of the age old “she had her period” (though much more disgustingly stated) to try and reduce the valid questions of a journalist to so much feminine irrationalism – these examples of his misogyny were only made more urgent by the numerous women who came forward to accuse him of sexual assault.  

Its not that I was living under some kind of delusion that sexism was done and over with in American culture. Far from it. And its not that I think every person who voted for Trump is a malignant misogynist. But those voters were able to overlook his sexism and sexual predation when they voted for him. As happens so often in our culture those voters “let it slide”. This is the same thing that happens on college campuses where date rapists get off with a slap on the wrist, or in corporate or military culture where years of sexual harassment and assault go unpunished.

The election of Trump was a signal that some very large portion of the population are tacitly okay with misogyny, just as it shows a large part of the population are tacitly okay with racism and xenophobia. Not that that should be a surprise either … the lack of any real action on the epidemic of police killings of black people which led to the “Black Lives Matter” movement should be proof enough that just because the United States elected a black president in 2008, we aren’t living in a “post-racial” society.

And so back to fear ... There is one more, lesser known “F” that is often triggered by fear. In addition to “fight” and “flight” – there is also “freeze.” Its another one of those hardwired, gut-level, animal responses. Think of the wild rabbit in the brush – freezing in its tracks as you walk by on a trail.

For me personally, freeze has always been my brand of fear response. It started for me as a very young child, as a victim of sexual and emotional abuse.  If I freeze, if I become small enough, quiet enough, if I’m good enough … It’s the reaction tied, for me, with dissociation (which in psychology is the detachment from physical and emotional experience) – a pattern that has continued throughout my life. The ongoing freeze-fear often kept me distanced from friends, lovers, family, from physical and emotional joy. This numbness led me to self-harm in high school, and later led me into a multi-year low-level depression that I wasn’t even able to identify until I was on the other side of it. This fear has kept me from expressing myself, being authentic, from writing, and from engaging with the world for decades. I don’t share any of this for any other reason than to stand in solidarity with every other person on the planet who lives with fear. One way or another, that’s pretty much all 7 billion of us.

I share this because my response in the days following Trump’s election was initially a vow to engage with my fear, rather than let it rule my life. It’s a work in progress. This fear still lives inside me. This fear kept me from writing or posting this article until now (and I am shaking as I press the “post” button). And that is what people in power, people trying to exploit our fears, rely on. They want our fears to spin us out into attacking each other, into immobilizing us, into preventing us from banding together. Our fear helps them maintain control.

So here is the thing about fear … it is always a signal to pay attention. Whether it’s a politician threatening a Muslim registry and a wall – or a gut-level fear of being fully present and telling our story -- fear wants us to pay attention and see what’s really going on. It took me decades to start actually paying attention to the daily signals of fear in my body – to believe in that physical response and begin to investigate it.

So, here we go, finally – a poem from Joy Harjo about engaging with fear. She posted the poem on her Facebook page in July of this year with a preface and an offer to share it far and wide:

“Because of the fear monster infecting this country, I have been asked for this poem, this song. Feel free to use it, record it, and share. Please give credit. This poem came when I absolutely needed it. I was young and nearly destroyed by fear. I almost didn’t make it to twenty-three. This poem was given to me to share.” – Joy Harjo

Fear Poem, or I Give You Back

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself. I release you with all the
pain I would know at the death of
my children.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the soldiers
who burned down my home, beheaded my children,
raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.
I give you back to those who stole the
food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold
these scenes in front of me and I was born
with eyes that can never close.

I release you
I release you
I release you
I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.
I am not afraid to rejoice.
I am not afraid to be black.
I am not afraid to be white.
I am not afraid to be hungry.
I am not afraid to be full.
I am not afraid to be hated.
I am not afraid to be loved.

To be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.
You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.
You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart my heart.

But come here, fear
I am alive and you are so afraid
of dying.

c. Joy Harjo, “She Had Some Horses”