reflection « eloping with poetry

This semester and this course have provided the space for me to really begin something – really begin asking the questions that will (I hope) help me to make the world a better place with poetry. I think I could have articulated that goal at the beginning of the semester, but wouldn't have had any idea how to pursue what that means – on the ground, in my day to day interactions with people. This course has prompted me to take the time to parse out what I think poetry is doing in my life, what it is doing without me noticing, how others are using poetry, how others think about poetry, the powers of poetry in different contexts.

I think there have been three major branches to my investigation. First, my personal investigation of how poetry shapes my life – both reading it and writing. Second, how I use poetry to engage with others – teaching, sharing poems, being taught, getting to know others through their writing. Third, how poetry can engage young people in various ways – reading, writing, integrating poetry into their understandings of narrative and voice.

I'm still coming to terms with the fact that I write poetry – that I want to be a poet. It would be easier, so much easier, if I didn't need to make art. But I need to make art. Somehow that sounds crazy and more than a little pretentious when it's written down, but I know that the most stagnant periods of my life – stagnant emotionally and socially and intellectually – came when I wasn't exercising in art, wasn't making something. I've made animated films and sewn quilts and dresses and I've journaled and collaged and cooked, I've even written short stories, but the thing that continues to feed that need to engage in something is poetry. There are moments – both in reading it and writing – where I feel quite literally high. And during the periods of my life truly saturated with the writing, the art, that feeling spills over into everything I'm doing. Dewey put it perfectly – "Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it." (Dewey, Art As Experience, p 12) Having the space to ask questions about this, spend time thinking about how art functions n my life, has brought be closer to coming to terms with how much I need poetry.

And although Dewey's commentary on art is far more focused on interaction between the world and art, it was also illuminating for me in the context of my own relationship to my writing. Dewey wrote, "Desire for restoration of the union converts mere emotion into interest in objects as conditions of realization of harmony." (Dewey, p 14) He's talking about turning feeling, turning my sense that the world needs to be interpreted, into an active process of rearranging my understandings of the world, rearranging words and phrases and images, into a poem that unifying force. And it's about more than just writing down all of the things that bother or disturb me simply to get them out.  By turning a bunch of exposing scribbles into something more coherent, I'm reordering the world – albeit in a tiny way. And each poem that I read – especially the good ones – is in turn reordering the world over again. (As soon as I wrote that last sentence I had to step away from the computer for a little while. Could that really be true? Do words really have that power? I believe they do, but how can I convince the rest of the world? How do you find objective – rather than empirical – proof for something that can't be measured because it's different for every human being?)

This writing process, this reading process is work. But to a great extent, it's not work I have to do alone. "New ideas come leisurely yet promptly to consciousness," Dewey wrote, "only when work has previously been done in forming the right doors by which they may gain entrance." (Dewey, p 76) Much of that work is in conversation with other people – poets and non-poets – about their world, about their efforts to find and create order and harmony in whatever way they go about doing that.

I had a few conversations with poets, asking them directly how they thought they used poetry to engage the world. And that question seemed to overwhelm them a little. It's a question without a static answer. We are constantly evolving and our needs and wants in relation to the world are changing, too. My understanding of poetry has always been not only hazy but also loose – when I say poetry, I really mean art, and when I say art, I really mean living consciously, with intention and grace and kindness and skill. So much of my observation and conversation about how others use poetry to engage the world came from non-poets, but from those I would consider artists. A friend who works at a chocolate factory in New York practices art not just in the creation of the chocolate (which goes from bean to bar in about 8000 square feet of space) but in the cultivation of community at the factory. He and his coworkers care about the integrity of the chocolate as well as the honest connection between themselves. That's art. I found it incredibly easy to get along with all of the people who worked at the factory because we all shared that underlying motivation – finding and creating new harmony and order in the world.

The connection isn't always that easy, though. When I visited North Carolina State, I struggled to sift through the normal sort of small-talk connections to better understand the other students and teachers, to hear what they were trying to do with their art, what they were trying to reorder. And a large part of why I didn't feel NCSU was a good fit was because I struggled to find those connections.

Dewey wrote – "The real work of art is the building up of an integral experience out of the interaction of organic and environmental conditions and energies…The thing expressed is wrung from the producer by the pressure exercised by objective things upon the natural impulses and tendencies….The act of expression that constitutes a work of art is a construction in time, not an instantaneous emission." (Dewey, p 67) This act of expression, this product of pressure isn't something that simply comes about in the vacuum of one writer with a pen and paper. It comes about through conversation with others. I've grown to appreciate over the course of the semester just how much these connections matter to me, and how hard they can be to come by. My workshop class this semester was far less cohesive than I might have hoped. In fact, the class was almost evenly divided into two groups of distinctly different styles – I don't mean in writing, but in how we connected with the poetry and with each other. It was difficult, in such an environment, to be wholly trusting of my fellow workshoppers. And trust, I think, is an essential component of using poetry to engage the world. In March, I went to Iowa to visit my boyfriend's hometown. He introduced me to a group of his friends. We were talking about the future, what I wanted to do, and he explained to them that I wanted to save the world with poetry. Which is what I probably would have said, too. But somehow, in front of that group of people, it sounded silly. I felt young. So trust is important.

Admittedly, the part of my original plan I have spent the least time exploring is how I can use poetry to help young people engage with the world. I've been working in the Central High School library and had some encouraging interactions with young people there – a poetry reading for Black History month, a display for National Poetry month, being invited to teach a section on poetry in an English class – but I think I'm still getting all of my thoughts about my own relationship to poetry in order, and so am having trouble translating that into something teachable. When I move to Victoria in the fall, I'll be working as a sort of personal tutor and resource for beginning poetry students in the undergraduate program there. I'm hoping that this will start to give me a better idea of how students can be guided through the use and creation of poetry.

The plan, then, is to keep thinking. To keep reflecting on what I'm doing and how it changes me. To keep thinking about the larger patterns of my life and the way they interact with those around me. And maybe, if I can begin to articulate the things I feel and know (that poetry, that art and living a practice of art can make the world a better place) I can help fold others into web of connection, a conversation about how to find a dynamic harmony and order in our world.