The Hidden Beauty and Necessity of Poetry:
Society's Window to the Soul-An OpEd Essay
Gardens need regular tending to assure their life and beauty. Society is no different. That is why from man's earliest recorded days, civilization has carved out a special place for poets as the keepers of our literary fields.
While by necessity the increasingly complex, electronically connected communities in which we find ourselves living at the start of the 21st Century demand we pay more attention to all that is economic or political, poetry nevertheless lingers in the background of our lives, surging forth in triumph and tragedy to tantalize us.
Most of the industrialized world's citizens today would find it utterly inconceivable to be without a cell phone or a television for more than a few days. Longer term, I think we would miss poetry more, although we will never fully appreciate its quiet, ubiquitous role in keeping us watching and wondering what new twists and turns life might bring next.
I was reminded of the fundamental necessity of poetry and poets at a recent meeting of a writers' group of which I am a member, the Independent Writers of Southern California, which invited four accomplished local poets to its regular Monday night monthly meeting at a Culver City auditorium. In these modest surroundings with a small but enthusiastic turnout, the four poets sparked a lot of feeling and love for the language we too often take for granted.
While the four bards cynically laughed off the fact that every five to seven years the popular news media "discover" that poetry is alive and well in Southern California, they presented no apparent lust for recognition or fame beyond the mutual respect they have for fellow poets and for sustaining poetry as an art form that has had at least 150 years now of free verse and practitioners in all the globe's languages.
Although I have read and studied poetry and some traditional English language poets since my undergraduate college days, I have rarely tried to write any verse, and I do not gravitate to poets in my somewhat homebound life. I try occasionally to write prose that is poetic, with little, if any, success.
The foursome gathered in Culver City-Suzanne Lummis, Laurel Ann Bogen, Eloise Klein Healy and David Oliveira-captivated me with their understated assuredness and their individual ability to convey so much with so few words in the poems they read. This skill, or artistic interpretation, should not be taken lightly by our society.
In retrospect, I am struck by the inherent democratic action poetry represents. And it is no accident that many poets are active in their communities. After all, what can be more basic than the right to express yourself publicly with all of the feelings and emotions you can muster? Just like town meetings and music concerts, we need more venues for the poets and would-be poets of our community.
Self-expression can heal and help both the poet and the listeners/readers. Throughout California, communities are undertaking the greatest public library construction program ever, thanks to about a half billion dollars of monies voted for in a statewide bond issue a couple of years ago. The advent of all these new, bright and shiny book repositories gives momentum to the idea of having more poetry read and discussed in the expanded new venues our tax dollars are creating.
I'm sure any of the four poets I heard from the other night would be glad to help make such events happen. Lummis heads the annual LA Poetry Festival; Bogen directs the LA County Art Museum's poetry series; Healy is chairperson of Antioch University's masters degree-level writing program and Oliveria is editor of SOLO, a literary journal. They are constantly moving around our region to teach, read and write poetry.
I have leaned on poetry at several critical times in my life, seeking the right tone, rhythm and voice that would provide both insight and comfort. I found some lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson once to grace a funeral program, a phrase from Maya Angelou to be etched on my daughter's gravestone, and a lyric from a Paul Simon tune to ease my troubled mind. I cannot describe exactly what finding these bits of what I loosely call poetry were able to do for me in my times of need. I know the older I get, the more I see the value of hope as we wind our way throughout lives that seem so predictable, but are only a millisecond or millimeter from being extinguished or irrevocably shattered.
In recent years when I was feeling depressed and without much hope for myself or the world, for that matter, I stumbled across a few words from the poet Emily Dickinson: "Hope is a thing with a feather that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all." For the past seven years, I have kept a journal as I found myself working as a full-time writer, and at the start of each year, and sometimes during other times, I post this short glimpse of hope from a poet's perspective in my journal. Dickinson's words continue to sing to me, never ceasing to have an impact.
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This piece appeared in the South Bay Daily Breeze in late 2001.
