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What is it about poetry that has the ability to connect us to those things we sense beyond language? The realm of the spirit, the metaphysical, close-to-the-jagged edge, raw nerve, depth of the heart, holy, sacred places--- those spaces seem more suited for the suggested music in poetry, the dance of language, the construction of that which makes and does not make sense all at once.
Yet poetry (when it is working well) is not vaulted, special, incomprehensible. When the art form is in the hands of a true artist, it is very comprehensible, even if it communicates something very profound.
A poem uses the bricks and mortar of everyday language to help us see what we did not see before, or to experience the world as more vibrant, more iridescent than before. Or, it helps us see the connections between us all that we had not noticed. It wakes us, stirs us, grabs our attention with image.
I've been posting poems all month on my own blog, as it is National Poetry Month. And the more poems I chose, the more I realized the spiritual content of them. Listen with me to Robert Bly mourning the death of his fellow poet, Neruda. Bly is driving in his car to his farm. He has a canning jar of water on the seat next to him.He starts thinking about Neruda, and the water, and says, in his poem Mourning Pablo Neruda:
Water is practical,
especially
in August, water
fallen
into the buckets
I carry
to the young willow trees
whose leaves
have been eaten off
by grasshoppers.
Or this jar of water
that lies
next to me
on the carseat
as I drive to my shack.
When I look down,
the seat all around the jar
is dark,
for water doesn’t intend
to give,
it gives away,
and the jar of water
lies there quivering
as I drive
through a countryside
of granite quarries,
stones soon
to be shaped
into blocks for the dead,
the only thing
they have left
that is theirs.
For the dead remain
inside us, as water
remains
in granite-
hardly at all-
for their job is to go away,
and not come back,
even when we ask them.
But water comes
to us,
it doesn’t care
about us, it goes
around us, on the way
to the Minnesota River,
to the Mississippi,
to the Gulf,
always closer
to where
it has to be.
No one lays flowers
on the grave
of water,
for it is not
here,
it is gone.
I love the coming to terms in that poem, the phrase "no one lays flowers /on the grave /of water". It speaks of grief, of letting go, of a universe moving along despite what we feel of a naturalness in the order of life and death.
Meagan La Mamita Mala has a stunning video on her blog of La Bruja a savy young Latina poet who is mourning as well, but with anger and a ferocious determination. She mourns the death of a woman she knows in the streets who became an addict, and the culture that made it possible. Watch this video. The language is very strong, as are the opinions. Her words have the power to move, and also ring like a bell with a fist inside.
Listen here to her breath-taking piece called WTC.
Kay Ryan, our most recent Poet Laureate, said in an interview in the Paris Review
It's poetry's uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. All this talk of usefulness makes me feel I've suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it's paralyzing to think of usefulness and poetry in the same breath.
There are poets who are more specifically known for their spiritual content. Rumi, a 13th century Persian mystic, is certainly one. Martha, from Malta quotes this poem on her blog:
A Poem by Rumi
ONE VISION
Day and night, no difference.
The sun is the moon: an amalgam.
Their gold and silver melt together.This is the season when
the dead branch and the green branch
are the same branch.Nightmares fill with light like a holiday.
Humans and angels speak one language.
The elusive ones finally meet.Good and evil, dead and alive,
everything blooms
from one natural stem.You know this already, I'll stop.
Any direction you turn
it's one vision.
The translations from the Bengali, Gitanjali or `song offerings' by Rabindranath Tagore (1861--1941)are another well-known source of specific spiritual content:
The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.
The time has not come true, the
