“Aht,” she says. But within
forty seconds, she’s back to calling them bees.
“Ant,” I reiterate.
“Aht,” she says. And forty
seconds later: “Bee.”
This goes on for half an hour.
We watch the scurry and scramble of their small,
red bodies, and she repeatedly names them bees,
then repeats after me, “Aht,” nodding, as if she
gets it.
Says Confucius, “All wisdom is
rooted in learning to call things by their right
name.” That’s tough enough for a one-year-old,
and I think it gets harder the older we get. The
things we try to name become increasingly
complex: Feelings. Ideals. Passions. Fears.
And this is where poetry comes
in. A poem uses words to name the physical
world—honey bee, anthill, mesa top, red rock. It
roots itself in details of the world that
surrounds us. That’s one way it reaches the
reader. “Show, don’t tell,” is one of the
fundamental rules of contemporary good writing.
Feed the reader an experience.
But the naming of things, no
matter how correctly done, is not enough. If the
poem is going to comment in some way about what
it means to be alive—as nearly all truly
“successful” poems will—then it must straddle
two worlds: the material world and the mystical
world. The mystical world encompasses spirit,
drive, emotions, dreams, for instance the
complex bouquet of reactions I have when I see
my daughter reaching to find words.
The mystical world, by
definition, does not want to be known. It
resists naming. When we can outrightly label
something, it’s no longer mysterious. But
mystery is what drives us, what keeps us moving
as we try to answer life’s unanswerable
questions.
In her essay “Survival in Two
Worlds at Once,” Tracy K. Smith writes that the
poet is writing to “survive in two worlds at
once: the world we see (the one made of people,
and weather, and hard fact) that, for all of its
wonders and disappointments, has driven us to
the page in the first place; and the world
beyond or within this one that, glimpse after
glimpse, we attempt to decipher and confirm.”
And I feel that this is
true—poetry can be a kind of survival mechanism
as we tussle with understanding who we are and
why we are here. What we feel is often
“unreasonable” and difficult to reconcile with
“the real world.” You can see how this is true
for me in my new poems “Before We Can
Unlearn” and “How It Is,” and also in
these four poems featured in the most recent
issue of
Sugar Mule.
Ultimately, I think our survival
depends on our ability to do this balancing act.
What matters is that we learn to pay attention
to what’s happening both inside us and around
us, whether we write about it or not. To this
end, I created an exhibit currently showing in
Denver International Airport, based on my most
recent book,
Intimate Landscape. It will be on
display in the walkway between the A Concourse
and the main terminal through mid-June as part
of 33 Ideas, an exhibit sponsored by
Colorado Art Ranch. Check it out if you are
traveling, or if you can’t, here’s a taste of
what it looks like.
I think that the act of writing
helps, though, in our efforts to understand the
un-understandable. It is more than a mode of
inquiry. The act of writing can be magic itself
as the words circle and cycle and name and
unname.
If you want to try your own hand
at weaving both material and mystical details
into a poem, check out the outline for my new
class,
Walking in Two Worlds At Once, in
my You the Poet section. I’ve included there a
few poems that illustrate this notion of
straddling.
It’s been two weeks since the
ant/bee incident on top of the mesa, and Vivian
is still calling the ants bees. Ants, I tell
her, almost always with a smile. I’m still
learning, myself, how to call things by their
right names. And ah, such pleasure in the
trying.
Hope you can join me in the art
of poetry … check out my daily poems
here,
or join me in person, my schedule is
here.
