Our newly appointed 25th poet laureate of the United States, Arthur Sze, has stated, “Poetry speaks to our deepest selves and connects us all, and it also speaks to the exigencies our time.”With this in mind, do you feel poetry can be a way to bridge differences, bring people together,offer hope and expression even in the most challenging environment? How do you see yourself as an advocate for poetry in your own community?
I’ve begun saying that I’m learning how to be a Poet Laureate as I go along. I’m asking myself how can I best be an advocate for my community, with poetry as my sustenance to offer? First, the question of poetry being sustenance to some, but can I make the selfish assumption that everyone can feed on poetry, find something satiating within it? And it’s not just that poetry is what I have to give – I could be quite creative in how I give, and poetry is only one of the offerings in my hands.
In answer to the question “Does poetry play a role in social change?” Adrienne Rich once answered:
Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire. . . . In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.
Poet Laureate Chen Chen in Redmond, Washington has literally figured out in Read Local Eat Local program how to transform poetry into recipes on postcards that can be handed out to people on the street at festivals. Just released in Santa Cruz is an anthology of youth voices in poetry. “Waking Up: Teen Poems of Resistance and Resilience” was edited by three teens from the Santa Cruz County Youth Poet Laureate Program’s inaugural cohort of youth poetry leaders: Simon Ellefson, Sylvi Kayser and former Youth Poet Laureate Dina Lusztig Noyes. Ellefson, a 19-year-old Cabrillo College student, said the idea came about from Farnaz Fatemi — former Santa Cruz County poet laureate and director of the youth poet laureate program. Farnaz is also a friend of mine through the Community of Writers Poetry Workshops.
I’m asking myself how can poetry be made into a thing that helps everyone/anyone find a moment to “slow down, hear clearly, see deeply, and envision what matters most in our lives,” as Arthur Sze says poetry does for us in a recent interview. These are the questions I’m asking as I design a project for Nevada County.
These questions do ask how can poetry bridge the differences between individuals, between you and me? Some of the answer is in relationships building over time between readers and writers, teachers and students, poets and poets. I’ve begun meeting with several high school students, slowly building some mentoring relationships. At a workshop, I asked each to choose one book from my bookshelves to read and write from, and the collected essays of Adrienne Rich was chosen. So, I began reading her essays, and in one called Someone is Writing a Poem, she writes:
We go to poetry because we believe it has something to do with us. We also go to poetry to receive the experience of the not me, enter a field of vision we could not otherwise apprehend.
Someone writing a poem believes in a reader, in readers, of that poem. The “who” of that reader quivers like a jellyfish. Self-reference is always possible: that my “I” is a universal “we,” that the reader is my clone. That sending letters to myself is enough for attention to be paid. That my chip of mirror contains the world.
But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers. – Adrienne Rich
I think as writers, the use of “we” can become a generalization that can erase the experiences of others. I often think of this if I unconsciously write “we” in my poem. Who am I bringing into my tribe of “we”, and who can I not bring in because truly I do not know them well enough to speak for them?
However, on the reader’s side of the experience of the poem, how fulfilled I would feel if my “I” on the page could be gathered into the arms of the reader to become a “we” even if also “we” contain differences as strangers?
So yes, I do believe that writing a poem that then is read by others can become a bridge between differences. And also reading a poem calls for paying attention, slowing down, listening in, seeing clearly, and asking what is it that is most important in our lives?
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