Baron Wormser: After Poetry Month

Someone asked me recently what a poet was. Without a second thought, I answered “a spirit guide.” That would mean that if a person didn’t believe in spirit in the sense that there is more to any living creature than the breakdown of biological components and if a person didn’t feel that any guidance in this world was necessary or that such guidance should be in the hands of a professional (or in one’s own self-helping hands), then poetry would not be a necessity, perhaps an amiable sometimes scintillating companion but nothing more than that. Given the status of poetry in the United States, it is fair to say that many people who are getting along without such a guide and, also, that many people would assert that giving poetry more space in the English classes where they typically encounter poetry is a waste of everyone’s time. A wink during April is plenty. 

   Also recently, I’ve led a group in encountering the poems of Emily Dickinson. I use that verb because we don’t read the poems. Rather, I dictate a line and we stop and talk it over. Then I dictate another line. This leads us to slow down and be with her words and not get ahead of ourselves. It also helps us to feel her feeling her way through a poem—how she is encountering different spirits of different matters as she creates a poem. We come to feel how made-up the poem is, how adventitious yet sensible, how daring yet rooted, how personal yet cosmic. And we come to feel that the poet, as represented by Dickinson, is a spirit guide, someone who is open to the challenge of interrogating what we are doing in this world, what we feel, what we know and don’t know, all through the lens of one woman who is very aware of the confines of her life and of language. 

   William Carlos Williams spoke of poetry bringing us news but that seems only part of the story. The full story has to do with vision, how a poet can put together in words something that is unique and that takes us to a place of understanding and feeling that deepens our sense of being human. Again, this may not matter to people since it seems too subjective. Indeed, it is subjective. Poetry is notoriously subjective—one more reason to avoid it. Yet poetry may lead us forward into that place of vision where spirit has elucidated some fraction of life’s mystery. Naturally, the mystery remains and that is part of the pleasure of poetry, how it consorts with the mystery but then must leave. Dickinson loved to summon up the specter of infinity but she knew how finite a poem was. Those quatrains were a tangible container, a very modest stage, and a springboard into the unknown.

   The vision I speak of may give us something like wisdom. The qualifier is important since it acknowledges that wisdom is dodgy: one age’s wisdom is another age’s dullness. Yet the juxtapositions that poetry endorses—this continually coming up against that—is a way in, a way that may cut through the glibness that characterizes our daily talk. To register the complexity of competing feelings and thoughts, the welter of perceptions that attends any situation, while writing something that compels and, line by line, does not flag but, instead, intensifies, is very difficult. The poet tries to be canny while practicing an uncanny art. 

   In recent times, it is fair to say that for many poets poetry is a faucet they turn on and out come the doings of the poet’s self. Such a self is understandably compelling to the poet and may, by extension, be compelling to the reader but often a poetry rooted in the self can only go so far down the road because it does not encounter anything outside of the declarative self. The notions that pertain to the self typically are about certainty rather than uncertainty, as in what happened, how I noticed, where I was, what memory came up, Poetry may thus appear as a species of nonfiction distinguished by its cursory intensity and metaphorical forays. The contemporary world, suborned by machine-ordered habits and endless reportage, posits a personal solidity that Dickinson’s world did not. Heaven, as Dickinson well knew, was officially elsewhere. 

   The validity of that spirit place where a poem can take us is, as I noted earlier, routinely dismissed.  Life, which in a commercial society is reduced to wanting, getting, and spending, is not about poetry. Unfortunately, people, especially young people who are the victims of despair and abuse, perish each day because they have not been shown how much guidance poetry offers, not in the sense of giving them one big truth to carry around like an amulet but in the sense of showing them how deeply life can be felt and how others over centuries have made their way with the help of words to that place of deep feeling. Poetry admits and dwells with our humanity, something that many other dimensions of our socialized existence are eager to push aside. Poetry is not interested in distinctions about happy and sad, real and unreal, yours and mine, politic and impolitic. Word by word, line by line, poetry seeks to find its way into what cannot be fully expressed but can be intuited. Even the most seemingly straightforward poem (one thinks of William Carlos Williams) may have a mystic aura in that regard, which, again, has been a reason to discount poetry. 

   To look at poetry as spirit guidance presents a stark dilemma since the context to frame poetry’s freelance truth-seeking is not there. Any teacher can imagine phone calls from parents who are irate about poetry arrogating to itself a position that they feel should reside with religion or that is irrelevant in the seemingly merciless light of science, technology, and mathematics. Who is any random teacher to take on such a role? Little wonder that discussion of poetry tends to hide behind behind technique as an end in itself, biography, “meaning,” and, worse, theory that is all too eager to use the poem as a leap into the arcane. In meeting a poem there is no “answer” of the sort that schools and tests are fond of. Instead there is much to discuss, feel, and meditate upon, since some residue of the indefinable, an admixture of light and dark, adheres to any poem that seeks to go beyond anecdote, particularly if the poet seeks, as Dickinson did, to honor the fullness of time—all those moments among countless creatures, to say nothing of flowers and trees and mountains, all that lost personal and impersonal history. The mind reels. Poetry seeks to somehow corral that reeling. 

   Once a person admits that reeling feeling (to make a rhyme)—and there are many reasons to not admit it beginning with sheer vulnerability—then poetry may truly be a guide. Young people, in particular, have a sense of that reeling since they are flooded by perceptions that cannot be resolved in a simplistic fashion, however much various institutions try to do so. Such guidance as poetry affords resides in demonstrating how mortal we are and that the only place we go is from moment to moment, day to day—our inherent drama. Over and over, Dickinson found infinity in that mortal movement as it played out from line to line, from one seemingly conflicting apprehension to another. The abundance of Earth beggars us but poetry can offer an amplitude that confirms for each person the worth of individual sensibility. Why we deny young people solace, insight, and delight is a riddle that, alas, is not a riddle. We have flattened life out in ways that agree with us. Our stances are pat, our opinions inarguable. Our schools teach obedience. The combination of doubt and confidence, passion and insight, that a poet such as Dickinson, and many another poet, offers is beside the point. One can only wonder then what the point is. 

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include a recent collection of poems, The History Hotel (CavanKerry, 2023). He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont.