National Poetry Month, Day 11

This article about why poetry matters has been on my desktop for almost two years; I think Heidi posted it. Here's some of it:

"In the Gospel of John is the well-known story of a woman caught in the act of adultery. The Pharisees, you’ll recall, are keen to trap Jesus, but he refuses to play a part in their contrived theatrics and instead, in silence, bends down and writes in the dirt.

This writing, says the poet Seamus Heaney, is like poetry: it doesn’t proffer a solution or propose to be effective or useful. (Echoes here of Auden’s famous dictum that poetry makes nothing happen.) Jesus’ unknown words are a kind of generative disruption, the opening of a space into which something new and unexpected can emerge. Poetry, too, is like this, concentrating our attention so that we might see what is before us (words, the world) recomposed as something sound, whole, undiminished.

Such a focused act of attention is ultimately, I would argue, an act of love. By love I mean (at least) what philosopher Iris Murdoch means: the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. This is the love that perceives another’s integrity and wills their well-being. In this way, the disruptive space and the generative act of attention that poetry make possible become gifts whereby we might imagine the wounded world, like a mistreated woman restored to dignity and safety, reconciled and returned to itself.

Or said another way: a poem is a kind of dwelling place, intimate and durable, and the disciplined reading of poetry—the willingness to abide with and in good poems—can shape and sharpen one’s perception of the world. The reader indwells that opened-up space where the act of attention, of love, is also the art of seeing truthfully."

You should really go read the rest.

This poem, on the other hand, has just been in my inbox one day; it came in the daily Poetry Month email from Knopf yesterday. (You can sign up to get it here.) Donald Justice, the email says, first published this poem in 1973. I offer it for my dear friend who lost her father yesterday, not to "the virus" as we call it now, but to the regular old illness he's had ever since I met my friend. The ordinary tragedies go on, even in times like these. For her and for her family I wish these "opened-up spaces" as they grieve.

An Elegy is Preparing Itself
by Donald Justice

There are pines that are tall enough
Already. In the distance,
The whining of saws; and needles,
Silently slipping through the chosen cloth.
The stone, then as now, unfelt,
Perfectly weightless. And certain words,
That will come together to mourn,
Waiting, in their dark clothes, apart.


That's what Holy Saturday is about, waiting, waiting for resurrection.

Here's today's Progressive Poem line, actually two lines, by Janet Fagal. And guess what? Somebody signed up for the 28th! That's been worrying me, somewhere in the back of my mind behind all the other worries, so I'm relieved to see the blank is gone.

1 Donna Smith at Mainely Write
2 Irene Latham at Live Your Poem
3 Jone MacCulloch, at deo writer
4 Liz Steinglass at Elizabeth Steinglass
5 Buffy Silverman at Buffy Silverman Children’s Author
6 Kay McGriff at A Journey Through The Pages
7 Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core
8 Tara Smith at Going to Walden
9 Carol Varsalona at Beyond Literacy Link
10 Matt Forrest Esenwine at Radio, Rhythm, and Rhyme
11 Janet Fagal hosted at Reflections on the Teche
12 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
13 Kat Apel at Kat Whiskers
14 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
15 Leigh Anne Eck at A Day in the Life
16 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
17 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
18 Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading
19 Tabatha at Opposite of Indifference
20 Rose Cappelli at Imagine the Possibilities
21 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
22 Julieanne Harmatz at To Read, To Write, To Be
23 Ruth, There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town
24 Christie Wyman at Wondering and Wandering
25 Amy at The Poem Farm
26 Dani Burtsfield at Doing the Work That Matters
27 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge
28 Jessica Big at TBD
29 Fran Haley at lit bits and pieces
30 Michelle Kogan at Michelle Kogan